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^ertofcs of European literature 

EDITED B? 

PEOFESSOR SAINTSBURY 



THE EOMANTIO EEVOLT 



PERIODS OF EUROPEAN LITERATURE. 

Edited by Pkofessor SAINTSBURY. 

A COMPLETE AND CONTINUOUS HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT. 
In 12 Crown 8vo Volumes. 



"The criticism which alone can much help us for the future 
is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual 
and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint 
action and working to a common result." 

— Matthew Arnold. 



I. The DARK AGES 

II. The FLOURISHING OF ROMANCE 
AND THE RISE OF ALLEGORY . 
III. The FOURTEENTH CENTURY . 
IV. The TRANSITION PERIOD . 
V. The EARLIER RENAISSANCE . 
VI. The LATER RENAISSANCE . 
VII. The FIRST HALF OF THE SEVEN- 
TEENTH CENTURY. 

VIII. The AUGUSTAN AGES .... 
IX. The MID-EIGHTEENTH CENTURY . 
X. The ROMANTIC REVOLT 

XI. The ROMANTIC TRIUMPH . 
XII. The LATER NINETEENTH CENTURY 



Professor W. P. Ker. {Beady. 

The Editor. [Ready. 

F. J. Snell. [Ready. 

G. Gregory Smith. [Ready. 
The Editor. [Ready. 
David Hannay. [Ready. 

Professor H. J. C. Grierson. 
[Ready. 

Professor O. Elton. [Ready. 

J. H. Millar. [Ready. 

Professor C. E. Vaughan. 

[Ready. 

T. S. Omond. [Ready. 

The Editor. 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York. 



THE ROMANTIC REYOLT 



BY 



CHAELES EDWYN VAUGHAN 

M.A. (OXON.) 
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

153-157 FIFTH AVENUE 
1907 



All Rights reserved 



PREFACE. 



There is little need of a formal preface to a book of 
this kind. And there are only three points which 
seem to call for explanation. 

1. It will be observed that the chapter on Germany- 
has been handled on a different plan from those on 
Britain and France. I have given little or no atten- 
tion to the minor writers. I have confined myself 
almost entirely to a few great authors and to the 
Komantic school. I am well aware that such a plan 
is open to grave objections. I cannot but think, how- 
ever, that, all things considered, it is a less evil than 
to hurry over authors whose work is so important and, 
as a whole, so little known in this country as that of 
Lessing and Herder, Kant, Schiller, and Goethe. And 
it is manifest that, in a limited space, it is impossible 
to give a full account of these writers and, at the 
same time, devote any considerable space to those of 
less importance, 



VI PKEFACE. 

2. The last chapter is not intended for anything 
more than a mere sketch. And I trust it may be 
judged accordingly. Here again limits of space were 
against me. And all that was left me was to attempt 
a bare indication of the course taken by the romantic 
movement in those countries which, for the moment, 
rather followed in the wake of others than contributed 
anything strikingly significant of their own. In this 
chapter I have been further hampered by my own 
shortcomings. My knowledge of Eussian is unfortun- 
ately defective ; of Czech, Polish, and Magyar I have 
no knowledge at all. In the three last cases I have 
been obliged to take my information at second hand. 
And in all four I have been confronted with the 
notorious difficulties of transliteration, which I cannot 
hope to have overcome. 

3. Owing to the peculiar character of the period, 
more space has been given to matters of philosophy 
and of political theory than in the other volumes of 
the series. The importance of the work done by the 
German philosophers, and the deep influence which 
they had upon the literature of their country, may, I 
trust, be held to justify the course taken in the one 
case. The vast significance of the French Eevolution, 
and the deep-reaching consequences of the theories 
which gave shape to it and sprang from it, seemed to 
call for special attention in the other. 

It remains only to offer my sincerest thanks to those 
who have helped me by criticism and advice. I owe 



PKEFACE. Vll 

much to my friend and former pupil, Mr T. W. Moles, 
who read my pages in manuscript and offered many 
valuable suggestions. The same kind service was 
performed by my colleagues, Dr Moorman, who read 
and amended the whole in proof, and Professor 
Smithells, who gave me some much-needed help at 
the end of Chapter I. To Professor Herford I do 
not know how to make my acknowledgments. The 
inexhaustible stores of his learning and critical judg- 
ment have been laid freely at my disposal ; and I 
owe him a debt which I shall never be able to repay. 
The same applies to Professor Saintsbury, who has 
patiently helped me with advice and suggestions at 
every turn, and who has shown unfailing forbearance 
with delays which were vexatious to me and must 
have been doubly so to him. And there are others, 
now, alas ! beyond the reach of thanks. Without the 
aid thus liberally given the following pages would 
have been still more imperfect than they are. 

C. VAUGHAN. 

Leeds, Jan. 1907. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

BRITAIN ....... 1 



CHAPTER II. 

GERMANY ....... 166 

CHAPTER III. 

FRANCE AND ITALY ..... 352 

CHAPTER IV. 

OTHER COUNTRIES ...... 463 

INDEX ....... 502 



THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 



CHAPTER I. 

BRITAIN. 

limits of the period — characteristics of romance — contrast 
between this and the preceding period — the precursors — 
thomson — goldsmith and others — macpherson and percy — 
their influence on the continent— their treatment of the 
supernatural — their resemblance and contrast— apparent 
reaction against romance — ended by cowper — his innova- 
tions — his religious fervour — influence of the religious 
revival — ' the task ' — cowper's attitude to nature — his 
humour and letters — the personal strain in his poetry — 
burns — his relation to scottish writers and to percy — his 
treatment of the supernatural — of nature — of man — his 
satire — his songs — blake — his poems of child life — his 
visionary spirit — pictorial element in his poetry — alleged 
classical revival — crabbe — his realism — his relation to 
romance — rogers — campbell — ' lyrical ballads ' — previous 
poetry of coleridge — influence of bowles — previous poetry 
of wordsworth — design of ' lyrical ballads ' — ' ancient 
mariner' — coleridge's other poems — wordsworth's contribu- 
tions — poems of man — pastorals — poems of 1799 — poems of 
nature — Wordsworth's joy in nature — personal note in 
these poems — patriotic sonnets — later poems — attitude of 
the public to coleridge — and wordsworth — wordsworth's 
realism — his romance — the * prelude ' — southey — scott — new 

A 



2 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ISSUES OF ROMANCE — EARLY WORK — SCOTT AND GOETHE — ' MIN- 
STRELSY '—ROMANCES IN VERSE — ' WAVERLEY NOVELS '—AFFINITIES 
AND INFLUENCE — MOORE — TRAGEDY : MISS BAILLIE — C OSORIO ' — 
1 THE BORDERERS ' — COMEDY— SHERIDAN — THE NOVEL — ROMANCE : 
BECKFORD — MRS RADCLIFFE — MACKENZIE — GODWIN — NOVEL OF 
MANNERS : MISS BURNEY — MISS AUSTEN — MISS EDGEWORTH — 
DIDACTIC NOVEL : MRS MORE — MRS INCHBALD — BAGE — DEVELOP- 
MENT OF THE NOVEL — LIGHTER POETRY : WOLCOT, GIFFORD — 
'ROLLIAD' — ANTI- JACOBIN — BURKE — EARLIER WORK — APPEAL TO 
EXPERIENCE — EXPEDIENCY — DUTY — LATER WRITINGS — HOW FAR TO 
BE RECONCILED WITH THE EARLIER — THE GROUND SHIFTED — ATTACK 
ON INDIVIDUALISM — THE TRUE END OF SOCIETY — EACH NATION 
BOUND BY ITS PAST — THE STATE CONTROLS THE PASSIONS OF THE 
INDIVIDUAL— BURKE'S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THEORY 

— ANALOGY BETWEEN POLITICAL LIFE AND THE ORDER OF THE 
WORLD — CHANGE IN THE WHOLE CONCEPTION OF REASON — HIS 
STYLE — ANSWERS TO BURKE — MACKINTOSH — PAINE — GODWIN — 
BENTHAM : AS MORAL PHILOSOPHER — AS LEGISLATIVE REFORMER — 
AS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER — COLERIDGE AS PHILOSOPHER — AS 
LITERARY CRITIC — LAMB — ' EDINBURGH ' AND ' QUARTERLY ' — 
ORATORS : CHATHAM — BURKE — FOX — SHERIDAN — GRATTAN— PITT — 
INTELLECTUAL ADVANCE IN EUROPE — STUDY OF OLDER LITERATURE 

— HISTORY OF LITERATURE — WOLF — HISTORY — THEOLOGY — 
CHEMISTRY AND BIOLOGY. 

The period covered by the following pages is, 
roughly speaking, the last quarter of the eighteenth 
Limits of the century and the first few years of the 
period. nineteenth ; or, to date by events in the 

literary history of Europe, the period from the death 
of Voltaire and Rousseau (1778) to the death of 
Schiller (1805). The scheme of the preceding volume 
has made allowance for a certain amount of over- 
lapping ; and, considering the difference of perspec- 
tive which can hardly fail to assert itself when a 
fresh writer takes up the narrative, it will be con- 
venient to give some little latitude of interpretation 



BRITAIN. 3 

to the provision there expressly made. With this 
warning, we turn at once to our theme — the Romantic 
Revolt. 

I 

With the middle of the eighteenth century a great 

change began to make itself felt in the thought and 

characteristics literature of western Europe — a change 

ofRomance. fr()m the gpirifc of cr i t i c i sm t0 that of 

creation ; from wit to humour and pathos ; from 
satire and didactic verse to the poetry of passion 
and impassioned reflection ; above all, a change from 
a narrow and cramping conception of man's reason 
to one far wider and more adequate to his powers. 
This change may be conveniently summed up in 
one phrase: the Romantic Revival, or, if our object 
be to lay stress on its negative aspect, the Romantic 
Revolt. But no such phrases can serve as more than 
a rough index. And it must be understood, on the 
one hand, that some few writers stand altogether 
apart from the general movement of the time ; and, 
on the other hand, that behind the apparent unity 
of that movement several distinct tendencies were 
at work. 

Thus the very words Romantic and RomanticismA 
though they have their use and are sanctioned by' 
long tradition, may easily give rise to misconception. 
They will certainly do so, unless we bear in mind 
that they cover two completely different meanings. 
In the narrower and more usual sense, they point 
to that love of vivid colouring and strongly marked 
contrasts, that craving for the unfamiliar, the mar- 



4 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

vellous, the supernatural, which played so large a 
part in the literature of this period, particularly in 
its later phases. In the wider and less definite 
sense, they may be used to signify that revolt from 
the purely intellectual view of man's nature, that 
recognition of the rights of the emotions, the in- 
stincts and the passions, that vague intimation of sym- 
pathy between man and the world around him — 
in one word, that sense of mystery which, with 
more or less clearness of utterance, inspires all that 
is best, all that is most characteristic, in the 
literature of the last half of the eighteenth century ; 
whether, in the stricter and more familiar sense of 
the term, it is to be called " romantic " or no. Other 
implications of the word "romantic" will come be- 
fore us in the course of our inquiry. But these 
two at any rate stand out from the beginning, and 
they must be kept carefully apart. 

Yet, distinct as these two things are, it is not 
difficult to see how, by shades almost imperceptible, 
the one passes into the other. It is the sense of 
mystery, the instinct of discontent with the world 
of " dry light," of pure intellect, which in truth lies 
at the root of both. It is this which comes first in 
the order of thought. It is this, with all that directly 
flows from it, which comes first also in order of time. 
The vaguer and less specialised forms of romanticism 
precede those which are more definite and specific. 
Gray and Burke come before Coleridge ; Lessing and 
Herder — so far as Lessing may in any sense be 
reckoned with the romanticists — before Tieck and 



BRITAIN. 5 

the Schlegels ; Rousseau and Diderot before Chateau- 
briand and Hugo. But, in each case, the earlier 
band of writers prepares the way for the later. In 
each case the later builds upon the foundations which 
the earlier had laid. In each case the younger men, 
if they do not own (nor even consciously feel) dis- 
cipleship, at least win their hearing from an audience 
which the older had created. 

It is this which enables us, apart from exceptional 
cases already indicated, to treat the various tendencies 
of the time as contributive to the same movement. 
It is this which justifies us in saying that they are 
sprung, in some sense, from a common source. But 
in saying this, we are bound also to acknowledge 
how widely separate are the springs from which that 
source is fed. We are bound to admit that we apply 
the term " romantic " to Wordsworth in a sense very 
different from that in which we use it of Coleridge ; 
to Eousseau or Herder in a sense very different from 
that in which we give it to Chateaubriand or Burger 
or Tieck. 

The general conditions under which the romantic 

movement took its rise, from which it wa& more or 

contrast be- less consciously a reaction, have been set 

tween this and j. ,1 • ,, i . -, mi _ 

the preceding forth in the two preceding volumes. They 
period. represent an obviously narrow range of 

human experience, a markedly limited view of human 
life. Keen observation and solid wisdom are there 
in abundance. So, in a still greater degree, are grace 
and wit and all the more trenchant, the more distinc- 



6 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tively intellectual, weapons of style. A wide, if not 
adventurous, humanity makes itself heard with ever 
deepening intensity as the century wears on. But 
however high we may place these qualities — and it 
is easy to rate them far too low, — no man will say 
that they are the only qualities which we de- 
mand in literature; few will even claim that they 
are the highest. Even in prose, where the surest 
achievements of the period were undoubtedly 
won, we miss the note of individual emotion, 
of brooding reflection, of imaginative passion — we 
miss the colour and the music — which we find in 
the greatest writers both of the preceding and the 
following age. In poetry, it need hardly be said, 
the contrast makes itself still more strongly felt. 
The world of Pope, and even the world of Collins, 
Gray, and Goldsmith, is small indeed when compared 
with that of Shakespeare and Milton, of Wordsworth 
and Coleridge ; while in France and Germany the 
earlier part of the century can offer absolutely no 
names to point the contrast against the giants of its 
last forty years; against Eousseau or against Chenier, 
against Burger, Schiller, and Goethe. 

It was in England, as readers of the preceding 

volume are well aware, that the dawn of the romantic 

Tu movement first declared itself. 1 And it is 

precursors. j n ;g n gi anc i that the various elements which 

met and harmonised in that movement may most 

1 See the remarks on this point in Mr Millar's Mid- Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, pp. 212-214. 






BRITAIN. 7 

readily be traced. For that purpose it will be well 
to glance back for a moment over the ground already 
traversed. 
[v The poets who led the revolt against the ideals of 
the Augustan age have certain features in common. 
Of these the most significant are a ready openness to 
the influences of external nature, and an equally 
ready response to the tenderer springs of feeling; a 
poignant sympathy with the sadder side of man's 
experience ; with the trouble that comes to him from 
without or, what is yet more characteristic of the 
time, with the melancholy, sometimes of a more 
pensive, sometimes of a sterner cast, which besets him 
from within. 

In Thomson, who is generally held to have initiated 
the revolt against the school of Pope, the two im- 
pulses are commonly held apart. In his 

Thomson. : 

successors they tend more and more com- 
pletely to fuse. The human episodes in The Seasons 
are, with few exceptions, 1 in the nature of purple 
patches, thrust in, it might not unfairly be said, to 
relieve the monotony of the descriptive groundwork. 
And just because it is descriptive, the groundwork 
presents the various scenes, successively enwoven 
in it, as so many pictures reproduced faithfully from 
nature, with as little refraction as may be from the 
personal emotions of the painter. 

In Goldsmith the process is exactly reversed. The 
scenery has become little more than a background 

1 The most notable of them is the picture of the shepherd lost in 
the storm ( Winter). 



8 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

for the human figures that move across it ; and this is 
GoUsmith still more true of The Deserted Village than 
and others. ifc j g of T he Traveller. In Gray and Collins, 
who represent a more decisive breach with Augustan 
tradition than Goldsmith, a like result is reached by 
strangely different means. Here the fusion of the two 
elements is complete. The churchyard is not merely 
the resting-place, but in its suggestion of sorrow lit by 
" trembling hope," the fitting symbol of a life " marked 
by melancholy for her own " ; while every object in 
the wide - watered landscape, half seen by Collins 
through the " dusky veil " of evening, gives back an 
echo to the " softened strain" of pensive rapture 
which fills his own heart with melody. In all three 
poets, it is not so much the voice of nature herself, as 
the "still sad music of humanity" vibrating in it, 
that strikes on our ear. 

And this is a new note in English poetry. It is 
different from the mystical adoration of nature, as the 
symbol of God, which is to be found in Vaughan and 
Herbert. It is still more different from the blithe 
delight in nature for her own sake which we know in 
the Elizabethans. And, though it is also different 
enough from the calculated effects of Coleridge, or the 
" exulting and abounding " force of Byron, it still has 
something of what we recognise as most peculiar to 
their temper. It is the first stage of that gradual 
transfusion of the spirit of man into outward nature, 
of outward nature into the spirit of man, which is 
among the most marked characteristics of romantic 
poetry. 



BRITAIN. 9 

All the poems here spoken of, with the exception of 
The Deserted Village, were conceived, and all, save the 
Macpherson two poems of Goldsmith, were written, 
and Percy, before the death of George the Second. 
With the beginning of the new reign came the 
publication of two books whose influence on the 
literature of the Continent, if not on that of their 
own country, it is impossible to overrate. These are 
Macpherson's Ossian and Percy's Reliques of Ancient 
English Poetry. The former belongs to the years 
1760 to 1763 ; the latter to 1765. What was the 
exact nature of the impulse which each of these 
gave to the romantic revival ? 

It was, broadly speaking, to deepen the strain of 
sadness still further, to strengthen it with the swift 
rush of tragic action, to charge it with the wail of 
wistful longing, with the muffled beat of despondency 
and despair. The former was the special contribution 
of the Reliques, the latter of Fingal and Temora. And 
it would be hard to say which of the two had the 
greater influence on the general temper of the age, 
which of them can claim the larger share in shaping 
the particular course taken by the current of 
romance. 

To gauge the full effect produced by these works, 

we must turn, as Wordsworth insisted, to the litera- 

Thcirinfiu- ture °^ ^ e Continent. Glance at the 

ewe on the earliest and most popular of Goethe's 

Continent. , , ... .. . . , 

works, and we still see it is m the 
language of Ossian that Werther bids farewell to 
life and nerves himself for the quest of death. Pass 



10 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

on two generations later, and we shall find echoes of 
Ossian in the sincerest and most passionate of those 
who created the "literature of despair." 1 Take the 
political movement of the intervening years, and once 
more it is the strained emphasis, it is often the very 
imagery, of Ossian which inspires the vapourings of 
the Carmagnoles and the full - blooded rhetoric of 
Napoleon. It is the same with Herder, it is the same 
with Chateaubriand. 

The direct influence of the Eeliques was probably 
confined within a narrower circle. It was less popu- 
lar, more distinctly literary, in its operation. But 
within this narrower circle it told with incalculable 
force. It moulded those who themselves moulded the 
literary temper of the time. The mark of the 
Eeliques is indelibly stamped on the poems of Chat- 
terton. They furnished the direct model to Scott's 
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and are the dominant 
influence on his original poetry. In Germany they 
were eagerly seized both by scholar and by poet. 
They supplied one of its keenest weapons to the 
armoury of Wolf. They stand in the foreground of 
the Pantheon of Herder. They were the " matins and 
evensong" of Burger. Without them the ballads of 
Goethe and Schiller, as without them The Ancient 
Mariner and The Three Graves, could hardly have been 
written as they are. 

The tragic motive, the tragic atmosphere — these, 
then, are the main things given by the Eeliques and 
Ossian to the romantic movement. To these, two 

1 See the earlier novels of George Sand ; in particular; Lelia. 



BRITAIN. 1 1 

things further must be added. The first, the cult of 
popular poetry, is closely connected with the preced- 
ing, and it explains itself. But it is significant that 
the seed thus sown bore direct fruit rather in Germany 
than in Britain. It was not from Percy, but from 
Eamsay and Fergusson, that Burns drew his inspira- 
tion. And when Wordsworth and Scott, the one in 
Pastoral the other in Eomance, took up the theme, 
it was not to the heard melodies of the people's song, 
but to the unheard melodies of their speech and action, 
that they gave voice. The original motive, thanks to 
the privilege of genius, was almost lost in the 
variations. In Germany it was different. Lessing 
and Herder in criticism and translation, Burger and 
Goethe in original poetry, all owed and acknowledged 
a direct debt to the initiative of Percy. 

The other point, on which, however, some reserva- 
tion must be made, is an awakened sense of the 
Their treat m y s t e rious, the supernatural. The reserva- 
iwntofthe tion is demanded on two grounds. It is 

supernatural. i i i «n i i 

needed because, as will at once be ad- 
mitted, some signs of that quality are to be traced 
even in earlier writers. It is needed because neither 
in the Eeligues nor even in Ossian is the evidence 
of it so strong as is sometimes thought. 

Firstly, then, a sense of mystery and even of the 
supernatural is to be found in writers of the preceding 
generation. It must be allowed, for instance, beyond 
question to Collins. His earlier odes offer number- 
less touches of the former. His Ode on the Super- 
stitions of the Scottish Highlands, to which may be 



12 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

added his Ode to Fear, is one unbroken witness to 
the latter. Yet a moment's reflection will show how 
timidly, we might almost say reluctantly, that witness 
is given. In the very act of welcoming the super- 
natural, Collins — perhaps with the shrinking instinct- 
ive to his malady — betrays that he mistrusts it. He 
holds it at arm's length. He rather suffers his 
imagination to play around it from without than 
strives to bring it forth, as his own creation, from 
within. He rather suggests it as a poetic theme for 
others, for the inoffending author of Douglas in par- 
ticular, than seeks to grapple with it boldly in his own 
strength. Contrast his Scottish ode with The Ancient 
Mariner or with Lenore, contrast it even with the 
Halloween of Burns, and we recognise at a glance how 
guarded he was in drawing on the treasures of the 
new region which his genius had discovered. 

On the other hand, it must in fairness be allowed 
that neither in the Eeliques, nor even in Ossian, is 
any overwhelming stress laid on the supernatural. 
In the Eeliques — apart from the Arthurian Ballads, 
which, it is safe to say, made less impression than any 
other part of the book — it is seldom that any trace of 
it is to be found. In King Estmere there is a touch, 
a rather perfunctory touch, of " gramarye." In Sweet 
William's Ghost the supernatural is more boldly 
handled, and there are some few other instances. 
But, taken together, they cannot be said to amount 
to very much. With Ossian, no doubt, the case is 
different. Many of the best - known episodes bring 
us face to face with the form of the gods, with ap- 



BRITAIN. 13 

paritions of the dead or the doomed. Yet even here 
the vein is hardly worked with the set purpose for 
which we might have looked. The bounds between 
the supernatural and the natural are faintly drawn, 
and the edge of the former is blunted accordingly. 
These incidents were stuff' of the daily life of the 
Gael, and as such they are presented by Macpherson. 
There is little or no attempt to make the readers 
flesh creep by their recital ; no desire, as in the full- 
blown romanticists of the next generation, to freeze 
his blood by suggestion of ghastly detail. 

So far, then, if judged by the course it took in 
Their resemblance England, had the romantic movement 
and contrast. been carried before the year taken for 
our starting-point (1775). 

Interpreted in the wider sense, Romance had already 
done much to bring the world of emotion once more 
within the range of imaginative art. Gray and Col- 
lins had idealised the mood of contemplation and 
melancholy. The Beliques and Ossian had deepened 
the vein of tragedy, which first comes to the surface 
in the odes of Collins. The poetry of outward nature 
had been discovered anew by Thomson and explored 
by men as different as Gray and Goldsmith, Falconer 
and Collins, and all this had widened the horizon of 
man's vision ; it had awakened a new sense of wonder 
in his heart. 

Understood in the narrower sense, the romantic 
movement had as yet barely entered on its course. 
If Chatterton and Collins and the later poems of 



14 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Gray be excepted, the Reliques and Ossian are per- 
haps the only works in which its action is clearly 
to be traced. But the beginnings, though small, 
were rich in the promise of the future. The least 
of all seeds was destined, within comparatively few 
years, to become the greatest among herbs. The 
period inaugurated by these two books — one of 
them, no doubt, questionable enough — was to prove 
one of the most brilliant in the history of European 
literature. 

The romantic movement owes much to each of 
these Collections. But, as regards style at any rate, 
the debt in the two cases is of very different kinds. 
The style of Ossian is charged, if not overcharged, 
with colour; it is emphatic and declamatory. The 
Reliques, on the other hand, are simplicity itself. 
There are few books in which effects so strong and 
deep are wrought with so little effort. The same dif- 
ference is reflected in their narrative methods. The 
narrative of Ossian is cloudy, not to say confused. 
That of the Ballads is a model of directness. If, as 
in Edward of the Bloody Brand, the hearer is ever left 
to gather the story for himself, it is for a special 
purpose — to intensify the horror by forcing us to fol- 
low step by step the emotions of those who prompted 
the deed and who did it. In no other way could the 
tragic motive of the poem have been either so briefly 
or so powerfully driven home. In Ossian, on the 
other hand, the allusive method wearies from its very 
sameness. It is seldom used for any purpose that 
might not have been served as well, or better, by a 



BRITAIN. 15 

plain statement. And it is commonly not only 
allusive but obscure. 

The very defects of Ossian, however, are not far 
removed from the sources of the power. The em- 
phasis, the heavy colouring of the style, the wailing 
note which rises from its cadences, the suggestion of 
sombre majesty which hangs over both style and 
narrative — all these fall in with one at least of the 
currents which went to swell the flood - tide of 
Romance. They found a responsive chord in the 
hearts of Coleridge and Byron, of Schiller and the 
youthful Goethe, of Chateaubriand and George Sand. 
Nor were they, if only through Chateaubriand, with- 
out effect upon certain sides of the genius of Hugo. 

The Reliques strike an entirely different, and it must 
be admitted a more stirring, note. It is the note to 
be heard in the poetry, above all in the songs and 
ballads, of Scott; in the ballads of Burger, Schiller, 
and Goethe ; in the more inspired part of the poetry 
of Coleridge. 

Once more, however, differently as the two Collec- 
tions may have worked in some respects, in others 
they can never be disjoined. Both of them deepened 
as well as widened the range of human passion ; both 
brought men once more face to face with the super- 
natural ; both, finally, led men to recognise the un- 
dying poetry of the legends, the memories, the heroic 
figures, of popular tradition. In this sense we may 
say that Europe owes to them not merely the works 
indicated above, but the seed which bore fruit in 
Old Mortality and Faust and La Lfyende des Sidcles. 



16 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

The opening years of our period did not promise 

well for the future of Eomance. A harsh fate had 

followed the poetic innovators of the 

Apparent re- r 

action against previous generation. Gray had "never 
spoken out " ; Collins, Goldsmith, and 
Chatterton had all died before their time: the two 
former cut off in middle life, the last before he had 
even reached the threshold of manhood. The two 
survivors of the movement, Macpherson and Percy, 
had been received, as has been said, far more coldly 
in their own island than on the Continent. Macpher- 
son's credit had been destroyed partly by his own 
shuffling and arrogance, partly by the relentless scorn 
of Johnson. Percy himself had the regard of the 
dictator; but that is more than could be said for 
his ballads. The star of Johnson, of the old order, 
was for the moment in the ascendant ; and the Lives 
of the Poets, advertised since 1777, was completed in 
1781. Any observer might well have been excused 
for supposing the romantic revolt to be irrevocably 
crushed. 

Prophecies in such matters are notoriously unsafe. 
The very next year (1782) saw the standard of 
Ended by rebellion raised afresh. In that year ap- 
cowper. peared the first acknowledged publication 
of Cowper, Table Talk, with other poems, serious 
and sportive. On the surface there was little to 
show the real leanings of the new poet, and they 
might easily have escaped a careless reader. The 
bulk of the volume was taken up with didactic 
verse, interspersed with satire on the religious and 



BRITAIN. 1 7 

social levities of the day. It was couched in the 
heroic couplet; it contained a compliment, though 
with "something of a double edge, to Pope, and 
even some few echoes of his style. On these 
grounds, and perhaps yet more on account of its 
fervent avowal of Christian belief, it secured the 
praise of Johnsou. Whether the champion of poetic 
orthodoxy would have felt thus, had he penetrated 
the extent of the new writer's heresies, or known 
his private views about the Lives of the Poets, may 
reasonably be doubted. As it is, Johnson's ben- 
evolent verdict may be taken to represent the judgment 
of those who were pleased to see so vigorous a writer 
follow Goldsmith in preserving the traditional metre 
of the Augustans, who were attracted by his religious 
fervour, and who, for these reasons, were willing to 
overlook his innovations. 

For the innovations are there, and they are not 

far beneath the surface. The language of Cowper, 

with rare exceptions, is singularly free 

His innovations. JL * 

— freer even than that of Goldsmith — 
from the artificialities and inversions which marked 
the school of Pope, the " poetic diction " from which 
even Collins had not been able wholly to escape. 
Eaised but little above the ordinary language of 
prose, it is probably the purest English which any 
poet had written since Dryden. The couplet in his 
hands — Churchill was probably his model — regains 
the freedom of movement which, in the main, it had 
lost since Dryden. The lines flow on with varied 
pauses, not couplet by couplet but paragraph by 

B 



18 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

paragraph. There is none of that forced antithesis, 
that laboured balance of line against line, hemistich 
against hemistich, which is so wearisome in Pope's 
disciples, and even in many passages of Pope himself. 
And there are, if only in one passage, touches of 
nature which for their genius of imaginative observa- 
tion are a new thing in English poetry ; the essentially 
romantic contrast between the "green meads" and 
the "yellow tilth"; the vision of the streams edged 
with osiers, upon which the poet gazed in his daily 
walks ; the image of the " blue rim where skies and 
mountains meet," which, by a flash of intuition, he 
transfers from the highlands he had never seen to 
the rolling pastures of the Ouse. 

Even more significant are the glowing outbursts 
in which Cowper gives utterance to the thoughts 
His religious which lay nearest to his heart — his paean 
fervour. ^ Q liberty ; his moving tribute to those 
who had toiled in the service of man or God; his 
denunciation of slavery ; his fervent exaltation of 
the Gospel and the ministry of the Gospel; his 
story, simple almost as that told by the evangelist 
himself, of the journey to Emmaus. With these 
must be taken the hymns, nearly seventy in all, 
which a few years earlier (1779) he had contributed 
to the Olney Collection. They are among the 
noblest in our language, and place Cowper in the 
same rank with the other great hymn - writers of 
the century — with Isaac Watts, with Toplady, with 
Charles Wesley. 

This side of Cowper's genius is memorable in itself. 



BRITAIN. 1 9 

It is still more memorable because it recalls the debt 
M which English letters owe to the religious 

Influence of ° > ° 

the religious revival, whether Evangelical or Methodist, 
of the eighteenth century. As to the 
ultimate effects of that revival on the general life 
of the country, there have been the inevitable dif- 
ferences of opinion. But in literature, and especi- 
ally in poetry, it would seem to have worked almost 
wholly for the good. It disimprisoned a whole world 
of thought and feeling which had been fast chained 
beneath the hide-bound formalism of the preceding 
era, and for want of which the land was perishing 
of inanition. The poetic revival began to make itself 
felt within a few years after the Wesleys' life-long 
mission was inaugurated. And, all things considered, 
it is difficult to resist the conclusion, not indeed that 
the religious movement was the cause of the literary 
movement, but that both sprang in the first instance 
from a common source; and that, as years went on, 
the revival in literature was immeasurably quickened 
by finding an atmosphere charged with emotion and 
sympathy ready to receive it. In Cowper's case, at 
any rate, the direct connection of cause and effect can 
hardly be gainsaid. ) And nothing could more clearly 
mark the gulf which separates him from Pope. 

Three years later than Table Talk, was published the 

work upon which Cowper's fame traditionally rests. 

Shortly before the issue of his first venture 

Tlie Task. 

he had become acquainted with a butterfly 
enthusiast, Lady Austen ; and in the honeymoon of 
their friendship she, being "fond of blank verse/' 



20 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

had commissioned her hero of the hour to write a 
poem in that metre. The unpromising subject she 
selected was the Sofa. This was the origin of The 
Task. 

Judiciously treating the Sofa merely as a spring- 
board, Cowper at once plunges into themes of his 
own choosing. The only part that the Sofa really 
plays in the poem is somewhat unfortunate. The 
grotesqueness of his official theme leads Cowper at 
times to infuse a flavour of the mock heroic, almost 
of the burlesque, which sorts ill with the solid qual- 
ities of the dish he sets before us. Those qualities, 
alike for the good and the less good, are much the 
same as those of the previous volume. The language 
is as pure ; the verse, more difficult as it is to manage, 
is as harmonious; the religious faith and the love 
of external nature are expressed with still greater 
eloquence. The style, no doubt, is deliberately staid ; 
but when the poet is truly stirred, a deeper note comes 
into his voice, and then his blank verse rises to a 
higher flight than any which had been written since 
Milton. 

As for the substance of the poem, the two main 
themes are nature and God ; and in Cowper's mind 
cooper's atn- they are inseparably connected. Indeed 
tude to nature. the f t .q U oted line, "God made the coun- 
try and man made the town," is the first direct 
avowal of a feeling which was to inspire much of 
what is best, not only in his own poetry, but in 
that of the succeeding generation. Cowper, how- 
ever, was not the man to stop short with an 



BRITAIN. 21 

abstract idea, however pregnant. And The Task 
abounds, far more than the preceding volume, with 
detailed observation of nature. Much of this, no 
doubt, is merely observation. It lacks the imagin- 
ative touch, without which observation is of no avail. 
There is too much of the market-gardener, too much 
of the retired gentleman with a taste for horticulture, 
about many of his descriptions. The Hypericum and 
the Mezereon, the vegetable marrow and the pumpkin, 
are hardly likely to stir the same enthusiasm in the 
reader that they did in Cowper. But such passages 
as 

" beneath (the trees) 

The chequered earth seems restless as a flood 

Brushed by the wind ; " 1 

such pictures as that of the winter morning or the 
noon in spring, or the changing aspects of the meadows 
of the Ouse, are conceived in a very different vein ; 
and they show Cowper at his best. It is true that the 
landscape in which he most delights is a sober land- 
scape, a landscape which in itself has none of the 
charm that belongs to the lakes and hills of Words- 

1 It is significant that these lines are quoted by William Gilpin 
{Forest Scenery, I. § iii, ) This writer, whose earlier work was known 
in MS. to Gray, played a considerable part in preparing the way for 
the romantic love of nature and the picturesque. He has something 
of Ruskin's delicate observation, particularly as to subtle effects of 
light and shade. But he is too much under the tyranny of "the 
picturesque," and his style aims at more than it is able to achieve. 
His best-known works are Observations on the River Wye and S. Wales 
(1782), which seems to have hovered in the memory of Wordsworth 
(Tintern), Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland 
(1786), and Forest Scenery (1791). 



22 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

worth, the mountain and sea of Byron, or the gorgeous 
transformations of the world of sense into a world of 
spirit which are the secret of Shelley. But it is the 
landscape which Cowper had made his own, and his 
love of it enabled him to render its quiet beauty with 
surpassing power and charm. It is a landscape akin 
to that of Collins' Evening ; but bating that exception, 
if it be an exception, and certain faint anticipations 
in other writers, The Task is probably the earliest 
poem in our language to reproduce to the imagination 
the effect left by a given locality, a particular type of 
scenery, upon the eye. Other poets had individualised 
from nature as a whole. They had taken a particular 
season, a particular hour of the day, and striven to 
paint either its significant details or its general effect. 
But none had given to this vision a local habitation. 
This was what Cowper attempted, and this was what 
he achieved, thus doing for English poetry and the 
English midlands what some few years earlier Kousseau 
had done for French prose and the lakes and copses 
and lower mountain -slopes of Western Switzerland 
and Savoy. 

To Cowper, however, nature does not only mean 
trees and flowers; it does not only mean river and 
upland, hill and valley, tilth and pasture. It is 
peopled with bird and beast : the nightingale, the 
stockdove and the kite, the redbreast and the bull- 
finch, the half- wild creatures which yet have been the 
immemorial friends of man, the fawn, the squirrel, 
and the hare. Here again he strikes a new note in 
English poetry. Earlier poets may have described 



BRITAIN. 23 

them, or some of them, from without. To Cowper 
they are companions and friends. Compare the poem 
on Beau the Spaniel with the stirring description of 
Theseus' hounds in Shakespeare. 1 In the latter the dog 
is a splendid animal, a thing useful to man in the ser- 
vice of the chase, an animated implement and nothing 
more. In the former he is a being who can anticipate 
his master's wishes, who can live with man as a com- 
rade, who can love and be loved. Or compare the 
lines on A Retired Cat with Gray's sparkling epitaph 
on A Gat drowned in a Vase of Goldfish. Both poems 
are full of humour. But Gray treats his cat through- 
out with a lofty patronage, which is poles -asunder 
from the human kindliness, the wistful fellow-feeling 
of Cowper. The same sense of brotherhood, a sense 
touched here into pathos, prompts his Epitaph on a 
Hare. The best and most characteristic work of 
Cowper in this vein is to be found in the shorter 
poems just referred to. But there are many instances 
of it, though doubtless less striking, in The Task. In 
all alike Cowper touches, and touches for the first 
time, a chord which has often since been heard in our 
poetry, above all in Burns and Scott, in Wordsworth 
and Matthew Arnold. 

Humorous though he was, the humour of Cowper 

is not seen to such advantage when he turns to man. 

ms humour Here he had been anticipated by Gold- 

and Letters. smith ^^ in the field Qf poetry ftt any 

rate, he is outstripped. It may be that he took his 
mission as religious and social reformer too seriously 

1 Or the picture of the hare in Venus and Adonis. 



24 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

to put forth his full strength in this direction when 
he wrote with an unconverted public before his eye. 
It is significant that his one undisputed triumph in 
this sort was won as a distraction from his own sad 
delusions, and, " but for that sadness, had never been 
written." John Gilpin is one of the gayest poems 
in the language. It is conceived in something of 
the same vein as Goldsmith's Mad Dog. But the 
"linen-draper bold" and the lady of the "frugal 
mind" have won, and deserved to win, more friends 
than the " man who ran a godly race " and the dog 
who, "to win his private ends, went mad" and bit 
him. Yet there is nothing in Cowper which can for 
a moment be put in the scales against the Parson and 
Schoolmaster of the Deserted Village, or the gallery of 
portraits enshrined in Retaliation. With the Letters 
the case is different. Here humour, and humour of 
a peculiarly human strain, is the first thing to strike 
us. And it strikes us the more by contrast with the 
other great collection of the time, that of Horace 
Walpole (1717-1797). There is no need to put the 
two collections in the balance against each other. 
And he would be a rash man who should undertake 
to say which is the more delightful. But it will 
hardly be denied that, if he lacks the wit and sparkle 
of Walpole, Cowper has a humour both more delicate 
and more human than his brilliant rival. The visit of 
a candidate, the escape of a pet hare, a walk to the 
next village, the present of a fish, the tremors of an 
author, the pranks of a youthful friend — such is the 
staple of his " divine chit-chat " ; which, however, does 



BRITAIN. 25 

not always refrain from playing even with his own 
gloomiest convictions. 1 None of his works is better 
known to the present day ; and none is more cal- 
culated to win him love. 

Cowper restored to English poetry the power of 

expressing the religious instincts of man ; he strength- 

m . ened its hold on the world of outward 

The personal 

strain in his nature ; he was a keen satirist and, within 
certain limits, a born humourist. In all 
these things his work is distinctive ; in most of them 
it creates a precedent. But there is one quality in 
which he not only had no forerunner, but in which 
he can hardly be said to have left successors. In his 
genius for uttering with absolute directness, and in the 
simplest possible language, his own personal feelings, 
the most intimate experience of his heart, he stands 
to this day without a rival. In the lines of The 
Task where he speaks of his own affliction — "I 
was a stricken deer that left the herd," — in The 
Castaway and in the two poems to Mary Unwin, 
he reached the highest point which it was given 
him to attain; and he opened a path in which no 
subsequent poet has been able to follow him. But 
though, in the strict sense, such poems stand alone, 
it is easy to see their affinity with much that is 
most characteristic of the romantic era. Their 
literary form, not to speak of their moral outlook, 
is strangely different. But in the last resort they 
are of the same stock as the self - revelations of 
Eousseau and his literary descendants, as the Ode 

1 See his letter to Bull, July 27, 1791. 



26 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

on Dejection, as much of the most notable poetry of 
Matthew Arnold. 

This, indeed, is the one point when Cowper stands 
in direct relation to the romantic movement in the 
narrow sense. In his love of nature, in his religious 
bent, even in his humour, he was touched by the 
vaguer tendencies of that movement, and his work 
certainly went to swell its force. Yet, the humour 
excepted, there is not one of them which does not 
betray the workings of an influence which is most 
decisively opposed to all that we understand by 
Eomance — the influence of Pope and the Augustans. 
Both in his religious poetry and in his poetry of 
nature there is commonly a sediment of discursive- 
ness, of argumentation, which makes it impossible for 
the stream to run absolutely clear. It is only in such 
poems as those to Mary Unwin that he works off this 
disturbing element. It is just where he approaches 
most nearly to the inmost spirit of romance that he 
comes most completely to himself. The only other 
work of Cowper which need here be mentioned is 
the translation of Homer into blank verse, which 
occupied him from 1784 to 1791, and which he con- 
tinued to revise until just before his death. It was 
avowedly undertaken as a counterblast to Pope, whom 
Cowper accused of " making Homer strut in buckram," 
and whose translation was certainly the chief source 
of the " glossy, unfeeling diction " which was the bane 
of English poetry for the two next generations, and 
which Wordsworth denounced in the Preface to the 
Lyrical Ballads. As a protest against this, Cowper's 



BRITAIN. 27 

venture had its importance. It serves to accentuate 
the instinctive reaction against Pope, which, as we 
have seen, was his starting-point. But, on the whole, 
it is lacking in the first essential of a translation : spirit 
and go. 

It has been necessary to dwell at some length on 
Cowper. For he stands, so to speak, at the parting of 
the ways : half a disciple of the old order, half, indeed 
more than half, a standard-bearer of the new. His 
successors are more whole-hearted. And, for our pur- 
pose, it will suffice to speak of them more briefly. 

The year after the issue of The Task, the first 
edition of Burns' early poems was published at Kil- 
marnock (1786); it was republished, with 

Bums. _ _. . \ / ' „ . r ' . 

additions, in the following year at Edin- 
burgh. Some score of further poems were added in 
the edition of 1793. Many more were published in 
two serial miscellanies, The Scots Musical Museum, 
edited by Johnson between 1787 and 1803, and The 
Melodies of Scotland, issued by George Thomson, to 
whom some of the most interesting letters of Burns 
are addressed, from 1793 onwards. The first collected 
edition was published four years after the poet's 
death, in 1800. 

The greatest of the love-songs x belong to the later 
years of Burns' short life (1759-1796). So do the 
finest poems inspired by the love of country and of 
freedom. 2 But, even without these and certain 

1 E.g., 0, my love's like a red, red rose (1794) ; Oh, wert thou in 
the cauld blast (1796). 

2 E.g., Scots, wha hae (1793) ; Is there for honest poverty? (1794-95). 



28 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

poems already written but suppressed for the moment 
out of prudence, 1 the Kilmarnock volume offered 
ample proof of the marvellous genius of the new 
writer and of his extraordinary range. Love and 
hate, pathos and scorn, a quick eye for nature, and a 
deep hold on all that stirs the heart of man — these 
were manifest from the first. And from the first they 
were welcomed in Scotland, though not unnaturally 
they were more slow to win their way across the 
Border. It is significant that Cowper, while he 
lamented the " barbarism " of the peasant poet, was 
among the first to recognise his greatness. 

Outward influence, the influence of individual 

writers or of literary fashion, counts for little in 

„ , ,. the case of Burns. Something he may 

His relation to . 

■ Scottish writers h&ve owed to Beattie ; something more to 
ercy. ^j an Eamsay and to Fergusson. But 
his only serious debt is to the floating tradition, 
the popular poetry, of his own country. And this 
is a debt which increased, rather than diminished, 
as time went on. It appears in the defiant humour, 
as well as in the characteristic metre, 2 of his 
earlier poems. It appears still more strongly, and 
under a form yet nobler, in the songs of later 
years. Here therefore we stand face to face with 
the true meaning of the work initiated by Percy. 
The Beliques were not merely a voice from the past. 
Their task was not merely to open a mine of striking 

1 E.g., The Unco Guid and Holy Willie's Prayer, or, to take an 
example of a very different style, The Jolly Beggars. 

2 The metre, e.g., of the Field-mouse and the Mountain Daisy. 



BRITAIN. 29 

incident or historical tradition, in which a romantic 
poet with a turn for folk-lore might dig for treasure. 
Their best service was to show that the past is still 
alive in the present ; and that the theme which is on 
every lip, the melody which rings in every ear, only 
awaits the touch of genius to become that which has 
the double charm of immemorial antiquity and of 
absolutely spontaneous individuality. It would be 
ridiculous to say that Burns would not have sung 
without prompting from Percy. But it may well be 
that the vogue of Percy, probably greater around the 
Border than in any other part of the island, gave him 
confidence ; and it is certain that the popularity of 
the Reliques did much to win him an immediate 
hearing. In any case, Burns is the supreme instance 
of all that might be drawn from the fountain of popu- 
lar poetry, first unsealed by Percy. The fascination 
of the theme and utterance of the country side, the 
sense that a poet must sing in the speech of his birth, 
in the language which comes charged for himself and 
others with memories of the home and of the vanished 
past, the charm of the savour of the soil — all these 
things were implicit in the labours of Percy ; and all 
come to the surface in the poetry of Burns. It is 
here that Burns is most closely bound up with the 
inner movement of his age. In other respects it is, in 
the main, the vaguer elements of that movement 
which he embodied. Here he is, in the strictest sense 
of the term, a romantic poet. 

The other point in which he approaches — ap- 
proaches, however, without entering — the inner circle 



30 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of Eomance is his treatment of the supernatural. 
s But here the approach is made with many 

His treatment 

of the super, reserves ; it is made, we may almost say, 
under protest. In Tarn o> Shanter, which 
he regarded as " his standard performance in the 
poetical line/' and again in Halloween, he takes 
up the theme, or something like the theme, which 
Collins had suggested to Home. But he does so 
with a difference. Vividly as his spirit world is 
painted, it is clear that what really attracted him 
was not so much the "superstitions" themselves as 
the fears and hopes, the desires and terrors, which 
they kindled in the breast of those who held them. 
The beliefs themselves are treated with jesting toler- 
ance, if not with a dash of sarcasm. It is the 
trepidations of the lovers in the one poem, the lusts 
and alarms of drunken Tarn in the other, on which 
the whole strength of the poet is put forth. To 
Coleridge or Burger the romance of these pieces would 
have seemed a sadly half-hearted performance, or 
rather no romance at all. The same is true of the 
Address to the Deil. From the first, the hero of this 
poem is the being not of Biblical authority, but of 
popular belief; not the Devil, but the Deil. From 
the first therefore, Burns being what he was, the 
belief in question is little more than a half belief. 
Even that half belief is quizzed by the poet in one 
bantering reference or comparison after another. 
And at the end it is fairly swept away by a burst 
of human fellow-feeling which, irresistible as it is, has 
certainly nothing to say to the gravities of Romance. 



BKITAIN. 31 

In the dramatic side of these beliefs, or half beliefs, 
in their power to stir emotion which would otherwise 
have slept, Burns took the keenest interest. But his 
own temper was too sceptical, his own humour too 
free from artifice, to allow him even that " willing 
suspension of disbelief " which is needful to such 
effects as were sought and attained by Coleridge. 
And this points directly to the real source of Burns' 
power, the true field of his genius. The loves and 
hates of man, his follies and his struggles, these are 
his true theme— these, and the instinct which drives 
man outwards into nature, which prompts him to seek 
the reflection of his own passions and his own destiny 
in the changing face of nature. 

In all these things Burns stands out sharply from 
his immediate forerunners. There is a fire, a passion 
in his poetry to which all of them, with the exception 
perhaps of Collins, were strangers. There is the dis- 
tinctively lyric note which is heard in none of them, 
except Collins. 

This makes itself felt, firstly, in his presentment of 

nature. He has few or no descriptions. The nearest 

approach to one is to be found in The 

Of nature. . 

Brigs of Ayr; and there the dramatic 
form in which it is cast affords an escape from 
the coldness which is the danger besetting that kind 
of poetry. In place of description, we either have 
a few vivid touches which suggest to the imagina- 
tion all that the poet deliberately withholds from 
the eye ; or the scenery becomes nothing more than 
a setting for the human passion which is the real 



32 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

theme of the poem, — its details furnish the imagery 
in which that passion is expressed. Of the former 
a notable instance occurs in the opening stanza of 
A Winter Night. Examples of the latter abound in 
the songs ; Of a' the Airts, for instance, or The Lea 
Rig or The Birks of Alerfeldy. But the most strik- 
ing perhaps is in one of the few dramatic ballads, 
which is also one of the finest poems, written by 
Burns — 

" The wan moon is setting behind the white wave, 
And time is setting with me, oh ! " 

Since the appearance of The Seasons, the set descrip- 
tion had been the stock-in-trade of all poets of nature. 
It had ruled the market in Britain ; it had made the 
tour of Europe. It had been assailed by the greatest 
critic of the time ; x but with no visible effect. Burns, 
if not the first, was among the first to break the spell 
of this questionable fashion. A few years before 
his death, it was revived, strangely enough, in the 
boyish poetry of Wordsworth. But it cannot be said 
ever to have regained its former hold. Burns had 
shown a more excellent way ; and that way, as soon 
as he had come to his true self, Wordsworth was 
to follow. 

In his feeling for living things, Burns was to some 
extent anticipated by Cowper. But here too his 
originality is evident. If Cowper advances upon 
Gray, so certainly does Burns on Cowper. With 
all his "sylvan tenderness," Cowper does not rise to 

1 LessiDg, Zaokoon, xvii. 



BRITAIN. 33 

the same instinct of brotherhood with the beasts, 
nor does he paint their fears and hopes with the 
same human pathos, that Burns pours into The Avid 
Mare Maggie, or Poor Maillie, or the Field-mouse. 
So completely does he throw himself into their life 
that, in the last of these poems, the very moral, which 
should by every rule of prescription have been ad- 
dressed to man, is spoken in consolation to the house- 
less "beastie," whose panic he interprets by his own 
dangers and apprehensions. 

Nor is Burns less original in his poetry of man. 
Good-fellowship, satire, friendship, liberty, and love — 
these are his main themes ; and he handles 
each of them with a touch entirely his 
own. The first of these, it is obvious, gives less 
scope than the others to a poet's genius. The secret 
of Burns' success is that he faced this frankly, and 
treated his subject in the simplest, broadest, and 
consequently in the coarsest, manner. The open- 
ing scene of Tarn o' Shanter, and still more The 
Jolly Beggars, give us the very devilment of light- 
hearted revelry ; revelry naked and not ashamed, and 
for that reason both more human and more healthy 
than if it had skulked behind the traditional in- 
nuendoes of bacchanalian verse. The triumph is won 
because the poet grasps the nettle boldly, or rather 
because he refuses to recognise that it is a nettle 
at all. 

This side of Burns stands out strongly from the 
general trend of poetry in his time. The contrast 
maliciously drawn by Hazlitt holds of others besides 

C 



34 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Wordsworth : " their poetry is the poetry of mere 
sentiment, Burns' is a very highly sublimated essence 
of animal existence." And it is a contrast which does 
much to account for the enormous popularity of 
Burns. It has won a way for his genius into the 
hearts of thousands who have remained cold before 
the more ethereal poetry of Shelley, Keats, or 
Coleridge. And this may be said without accepting 
Hazlitt's implied sneer at "mere sentiment," or 
denying that to give imaginative form to such senti- 
ment is the noblest function of the poet. 

A higher flight was offered by satire ; and in no 
direction does Burns break more markedly with the 
traditions of the century. Compare his 
satire with that of Pope. Both poets 
excel in dramatic portraits. But, alike in method 
and temper, the contrast is significant. Pope's por- 
traits are masterpieces of analysis; those of Burns 
are dramatic creations. Pope's thrusts are prompted 
by deadly hatred ; Burns, scornful though he may 
be, has something of the good -humour of Dryden. 
The contrast, no doubt, may easily be pushed too 
far, at least as regards method. It would be absurd 
to maintain that Pope's method in Sir Balaam is 
unreservedly analytic. It would be absurd to deny 
that his character of Atticus, with all its dissec- 
tions and antitheses, is, in the fullest sense of 
the term, a creation. But, though the elements of 
humour are present in the latter portrait, they are 
prevented from crystallising by the sheer malice of 
the painter. And, even had they done so, the " civil 



BRITAIN. 35 

leer " of Atticus hardly cuts so deep into the roots of 
things as the unsuspecting hypocrisy of Holy Willie, 
who thinks his vices aloud with the complacent 
rhetoric of one trained professionally to the conviction 
that all his qualities must be virtues. So it remains 
true that the Prayer, though its method recalls that 
of Hudibras, is a new thing in a century which is 
pre eminently that of satire; and that, as a distinct 
form of poetry, unless we except the self-revelations 
of Byron's Southey, the way here opened by Burns is 
a way since practically untrodden. 

It is in song, however, that the powers of Burns are 

at their brightest : in the one song which embodies 

for all time the Scot's devotion to his 

His songs. 

fatherland ; in the many which embalm 
the various moods of love. Which of our poets has 
sung of love so simply, so naturally, so irresistibly 
from the heart? There is no need to repeat here 
what has already been said about the imagery of 
these poems. But what is the secret of their mar- 
vellous rhythm ? It is that, like so many of the 
Elizabethan lyrics, they were actually written to 
music, — music which had rung itself into his heart 
and become part of his very being. " Until I am 
complete master of a tune," he writes to Thomson, 
"I can never compose for it. When one stanza is 
composed — which is generally the most difficult part 
of the business — I walk out, sit down now and then, 
look out for objects in nature around me that are in 
unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy 
and workings of my bosom, humming every now 



36 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

and then the air with the verses I have framed." 
Certainly, not only as to melody, but also as to 
imaginative quality and imagery, this accounts for 
much. 

With the narrower aspects of the romantic revival 
Burns has little in common. Except in his love for 
all that savours of the soil — its speech, its rhythms, 
and its melodies — he can hardly be said to touch 
them. With the wider bearings of romance, however, 
he went heart and soul. He has the rich humour, he 
has the lyric fervour, he has the genius for idealising 
common things, which are of its essence. And he has 
these in greater measure than any of his forerunners. 
For this reason it may fairly be said that, with the 
publication of Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect, the 
triumph of the romantic revolt was practically ensured. 
If recognition came to Burns sooner than to other 
poets of his day, for Blake (1757-1827) it was delayed 
till long after death. His first volume, 
Poetical Sketches (1783), appeared before 
The Task, before the early poems of Burns. All, 
or nearly all, his poetry — such of it as counts — 
was published before the Lyrical Ballads. x But 
for all practical purposes it might never have been 
issued. A handful of personal friends knew and 
loved it from the first; "his poems are as grand 
as his pictures," Fuseli is recorded to have said. As 
time went on, but not until it had been twenty or 
thirty years before the public, it became known to 

1 Songs of Innocence, 1789 ; Songs of Experience, 1794 ; the Pro- 
phetic Books from 1789 to 1804 and even later. 



BRITAIN. 37 

Wordsworth and Coleridge. 1 But to the world at large 
it was a sealed book. And the middle of the nine- 
teenth century had passed before the rare greatness of 
its author was in any way generally acknowledged. 

This long neglect was doubtless partly due to 
accident — the accident of Blake's lifelong warfare 
with the publishers. But the cause is to be sought 
mainly in the poetry itself: in its childlike simplicity; 
in its profound mysticism ; in its anticipation of 
tendencies which did not come to ripeness till the 
days of the Pre-Eaphaelite Brotherhood. It is to be 
sought, that is, in the very originality of the poet — a 
poet born, it may truly be said, out of due time ; in 
the very qualities which, with his magical symbolism 
and his subtle, if fitful, ear for melody, are now recog- 
nised as the surest marks of his greatness. 

The poems written for and about children are 
perhaps those which are now most widely known and 
ms poems of understood. And few are more charac- 
cJiiidiife. teristic of his genius. If he does not, 
like Wordsworth, seize the aloofness of the child's 
life, that which makes the child like a spirit of 
an abiding world moving among creatures of a day, 
he shares the every-day joys and sorrows of children, 
their openness to sudden gusts or lingering memories 
of terror and ecstasy ; he feels the poetry of their 
grief and their gladness, the grace of their rest and 

1 I infer from a passage in Crabb Robinson's Diary (i. 201) 
that Wordsworth first became acquainted with Blake's poetry in 
1812 ; it is certain that Coleridge did not discover it till 1818 (see 
Letters, p. 687). 



38 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

their motion, as no other poet has felt or shared 
them except Hugo. The open-eyed curiosity of child- 
hood, its genius for welcoming each new experi- 
ence as it comes — all this to Blake was familiar as 
the day. For throughout life, behind the subtle 
instinct of the artist, he had himself the heart of a 
child. And this came to be more and more so as 
years went on. His first volume, composed mostly 
in boyhood and very early youth, is without direct 
evidence to it. The Songs of Innocence and Experi- 
ence are full of it. Yet behind this simpler strain 
there is an undertone of mysticism, deeper than that 
of Wordsworth himself. And it is the union of the 
two that makes the specific quality of his poetry. It 
is a quality of which there had been practically no 
trace in our poetry since the seventeenth century 
mystics. 

It was just because of his feeling for children that 
Blake was, like them, a confirmed visionary. He was 
His visionary so in both senses of the term. He lived 
spirit. j n a wor i(i f visions. And he saw those 

visions as vividly as other men see trees and houses. 
This is apparent not only in the Designs, which 
fall beyond our scope ; not only in the Prophetic 
Books, to which no passing notice can do justice ; 
but also, and hardly less so, in the Poems. With 
all his love of form and colour, of sunshine and 
flowers, and the " human form divine," it was not 
in the world of outward things that he either sought 
or found them. It was in his own heart, and in 
the " shaping spirit," which built up again from 



BRITAIN. 39 

within, and with the largest possible licence of 
adaptation, all that it had unconsciously taken to 
itself from without. " Natural objects," he wrote in a 
note pencilled on the margin of Wordsworth's Poems, 
"always did, and do now, weaken, deaden, and 
obliterate imagination in me." We might have 
guessed it, even if he had not told us himself. His 
poems, like his designs, abound in images from nature. 
But here, too, they are commonly, in the strictest 
sense of the term, images and nothing more. They 
are symbols of the human thought, the human passion, 
the mystical divination, for which he is striving to 
find utterance. The Sunflower is but one instance, 
though perhaps the most incomparable of them all, 
of his ceaseless endeavour 

" To see a world in a grain of sand, 
And a heaven in a wild flower ; 
Hold infinity in the palm of [the] hand, 
And eternity in an hour." l 

Even in poems where he seems to take outward 
things for his theme, the same impulse, under another 
form, may clearly be traced. A glance at the lines to 
Spring, which open the Poetical Sketches, will show 
that it is not Spring as seen by the bodily eye, but the 
vision of it revealed to the spirit, of which he sings. 
And so with the other seasons, and the Evening Star, 
and Morning. All these are magnificent personifica- 
tions. They challenge comparison with Collins* 
personification of Evening, and with that of Autumn 
in the central stanza of the Ode of Keats. But they 

1 Auguries of Innocence : Sampson's ed., p. 288. 



40 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

are more ethereal ; and the detail, for all its beauty, is 
more completely subordinated to the spiritual effect 
than it is in either of the other poets. 

No less full of mystical feeling, though quite in 
another direction, are the poems which give imagin- 
ative form to his moral and spiritual creed. Here, 
again, all outward things — in this case, all outward 
law, all specific duties — have melted away. Pity and 
love alone are left. When we consider how perilous 
such themes are to the poet, it is little short of a 
miracle that Blake should have touched them into 
poetry so noble as are parts, at any rate, of the 
Everlasting Gospel and other pieces. Consciously or 
unconsciously he follows the symbolic method, he 
has echoes even of the rhythmical movement, of 
the older mystics, particularly of Vaughan ; x just 
as in the early love -poem, My silks and fine array, 
he has caught — consciously, it should seem, in this 
instance — the very form and music of the great 
Elizabethans. 

So far, it is mainly the wider issues of the romantic 
spirit that we have been tracing ; the sense of wonder, 
Pictorial element the attempt to break through the hard 
in Ms poetry. r j n( j £ convention and routine, the vision- 
ary longings of a soul ill at ease in a world of sense. 
And all of these, except the last, assert themselves 
in other poets of the time, even in those who cannot, 
in the stricter sense, be called romantic. With the 
visionary instincts, however, — and they belong to 
Blake with far greater intensity than to any poet 

1 See Everlasting Gospel, fragment r, ib., pp. 258-60. 



BRITAIN. 41 

of his day, — we already stand on the threshold of 
the inner region of Komance. And there are other 
qualities of his poetry which still more decisively 
carry us within the pale. Such are to be found in 
the poems which either suggest or explicitly embody 
the terror of the supernatural — Little Boy Lost, for 
instance, and Fair Elenor. Such, in a still deeper 
sense, inspire the "sketches," in which the painter's 
art goes hand in hand with the poet's ; the prayer 
to the Evening Star to " wash the dusk with silver," 
or the rushing succession of images in The Tiger. Of 
all poets, until we come to Eossetti, Blake is the 
most pictorial. And it is here that he is most at 
one with Eomance. 

The twelve years following 1782 saw the tide 
setting fairly towards Eomance. They also saw a 
Alleged classical certain backwash towards the classical 
remvai. ideals. The two men whose names are 

commonly identified with this return upon the past 
are Crabbe (1754-1832) and Sogers (1763-1855); 
and with them must be joined Campbell (1777- 
1844), who, coming somewhat later, was, in his 
earlier work at any rate, more decidedly classical 
than either of them. No one of them, indeed, is 
a classicist in more than a very limited sense. It 
is not from Pope, so much as from Gray and Gold- 
smith, — from those who led the first line of revolt 
against Pope, — that they trace descent. Eomantic 
they are not; not consistently; not in the sense in 
which Blake, or even Burns, is romantic. But in 



42 EUROPEAN LITEEATUEE — THE ROMANTIC EEVOLT. 

each of them the vein of reflection, of sympathy 
with humanity, of love for outward nature, is so 
strong, the points of contrast with the true Augus- 
tans, of kinship with the true romanticists, are so 
many, that to rank them as classics of pure blood 
would be impossible. 

Of the three, Crabbe was the earliest, and he was 

by far the most original. His choice of metre — for 

most of his work is in the heroic couplet 

Crafibe. * 

— has blinded some of his readers to the 
novelty of his style and matter. And at times it 
comes perilously near to doggerel. But it is hard 
to see what other metre would have suited his 
purpose — of rapid narrative — equally well. And 
whatever metre he had chosen, he would still have 
been a rough workman. His real passion was 
observation, — observation of man, and especially the 
darker side of man's character and lot. And he 
sets about his task with the fixed resolve that it 
shall be done "as Truth will paint it, and as Bards 
will not." It is this that caused Hazlitt to denounce 
him, with scant justice, as a " spy upon nature," as 
one who turned " the world into one vast infirm- 
ary." What Hazlitt does not give sufficient credit 
for is the vast sympathy which lies behind the 
observer's instinct; the sleepless compassion for the 
wilderness of misery which he sees around him, and 
which he paints with a force all the more telling 
because it spends itself mainly upon the sombre side 
of the picture. In this sense — a narrow sense, it 
may at once be admitted — Byron was justified in 



BRITAIN. 43 

describing him as " nature's sternest painter, and 
her best." 

To paint in minute detail, and to paint what is in 
itself forbidding, is commonly taken to be the mark of 
the realist. And Crabbe is not only a realist 
but, Defoe apart, the father of realism in 
modern literature. Such a method, no doubt, belongs 
to the satirist, alike in ancient and in modern times ; 
but the satiric intention gives it an altogether different 
significance. It appears, as an element, in Eomance ; 
witness The Ancient Mariner, notably in the original 
draft, and a countless number of touches in the work 
of Hugo. But there it enters merely by way of con- 
trast, and its function is strictly subordinated to the 
general effect. The thoroughbred realist stands on 
very different ground. Here the sordid or ugly is 
taken for its own sake ; or, if any ulterior motive can 
be alleged, in the faith that unvarnished truth, how- 
ever repellent at first sight, is not merely bracing to 
the intellect, but also rich in beauty to the imagination. 
The theory — though it is by no means always that 
the artist has troubled himself with theory — is prob- 
ably true. But true only upon two conditions. The 
first is that the whole truth be given, and not merely 
the ugly or sordid part. The second, that the bare 
fact shall be lighted up by the poet's imagination ; 
that he shall not stop short with the letter, which 
is manifest to all, but read through it to the inner 
meaning, which is the possession of the few. On the 
former of these conditions it is not fair to insist too 
rigorously ; for, art being selection, the artist must be 



44 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

allowed freedom in the choice of his materials. On 
the latter, until the Police News be admitted to the 
honours of poetry, no compromise is possible. 

How far is each of these conditions satisfied by 
Crabbe ? To the former, it must be admitted, he 
gives the loosest of interpretations. His picture of 
life, at any rate in his earlier writings, is one of gloom 
almost unrelieved. Even nature herself is clouded 
by the dominant despair. 1 But what the picture 
loses in fidelity, it may be said to gain in effect. The 
effect, doubtless, is not of the highest. But, such 
as it is, it depends largely on iteration ; and it bites 
the deeper, because it is aimed so persistently at the 
same mark. On the latter point he is more exacting 
with himself. It is not from idle curiosity — nor is 
it, as it has been with some later realists, from a 
pedantic adherence to method — that he probes so 
closely into the misery of man. It is from heart- 
felt compassion, and a conviction that compassion is 
a vain thing unless it be willing to know and face 
the worst. Yet even here no one will contend that 
Crabbe reached the highest ; that he held the secret 
which enabled Wordsworth, for instance, to touch 
what in other hands would have remained sordid 
and speechless misery into the noblest tragedy. There 
is too much of the pathologist about him; perhaps 
there is too much also of the moralist. 

1 See the descriptions in The Village and The Borough (The Poor 
and their Dwellings). But a fine description, in blank verse, of the 
Fens in winter should be contrasted. The MS. is in the possession 
of Professor Dowden, but a fragment was quoted in the Atheiiceum 
of Oct. 31, 1903. 



BRITAIN. 45 

In his own field, however, Crabbe stands almost 
without a rival. His pathos, his command of the 
ms relation springs of human wretchedness, go very 
to romance. (j ee p jj e h as touches of true, if commonly 
rather grim, humour. His knowledge of the harsher 
side of life and character is without equal since Defoe. 
Nay, in one or two pieces — almost the only ones, it 
may be noted, in which he deserts the heroic couplet 
for a more impassioned metre — he leaves the solid 
earth, which was his common haunt, and startles us 
by the strength he shows in the charmed circle of 
Eomance. The Hall of Justice and Sir Eustace Chey 
and The World of Dreams are not only full of tragic 
power; they give bodily form to the horror of the 
supernatural ; reminding us, though it may be but 
faintly, of Browning's Madhouse Cells, or, on another 
side, of the most terrible of all Coleridge's visions, The 
Pains of Sleep. It is only if such poems be over- 
looked — and, with them, such pieces, more nearly 
approaching to his usual manner, as Peter Grimes — 
that Crabbe could by any stretch be regarded as a 
disciple of Pope. And under no circumstances is 
the parallel anything but misleading. 

The literary life of Crabbe covered more than half 
a century, and brought him acquainted with at least 
two generations of notable men. His first memorable 
poem, The Library (1781), won him the help of Thur- 
low and the ever -ready friendship of Burke. His 
next, The Village (1783), the first piece in which he 
found his true manner, was, through the mediation 
of Eeynolds, revised by Johnson, shortly before his 



46 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

death. Then followed an interval of more than 
twenty years, broken only by the publication of The 
Newspaper (1785). At the end of this long silence 
came The Parish Register (1807), which was revised 
by Fox in his last illness; then The Borough (1810), 
the Tales (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819). By 
this time he had won the friendship of many writers 
of the younger generation, among them Wordsworth ; 
and it is difficult not to suspect a touch of Words- 
worth's influence on some of his later poems. Indeed 
in the Tales, and still more the Tales of the Hall, both 
temper and manner are markedly changed from those 
of the earlier volumes. There is less of the gazetteer 
about them, and the clouds are broken by more 
frequent gleams of sunshine. Moreover, their grasp 
of dramatic truth is much deeper. 

The work of Eogers, whether in bulk or significance, 

is much slighter. His first volume, containing an Ode 

on Superstition, too obviously modelled on 

Rogers. 

Gray, with other poems, was published in 
1786. The Pleasures of Memory followed in 1792; 
then the Voyage of Columbus, a collection of fragments 
(1812) ; Jacqueline, in the same volume with Byron's 
Lara (1814); Human Life (1819); and, finally, Jtaly 
(1822-28). 

With the exception of Jtaly, nearly all his poetry * is 
in the heroic couplet, polished to an excess of smooth- 
ness, but almost entirely free from the antithesis which 
is too apt to go with smoothness. Of the more flowing 
form of the couplet he was certainly among the most 

1 Jacqueline is in the eight -syllabled couplet. 



BRITAIN. 47 

accomplished masters. As to style and matter, the 
general effect, though not imposing, is distinctive 
enough ; and this, in spite of the fact that echoes of 
earlier poets — in particular, of Milton, Pope, and Gray 
— are almost incessant. The Pleasures of Memory, no 
doubt, suffers from one of those abstract subjects so 
dear to the soul of Akenside and Hayley; and its 
attractions are not enhanced by a discourse, happily 
brief, on the law of association, which is prefixed in 
prose. But, in the actual execution, it is far more 
concrete than one could have had any right to expect ; 
it is enlivened by a romantic anecdote, most gracefully 
told; and, like all the poet's work, though not his 
table-talk, it is full of tenderness. The same is true 
of Human Life, which is written in much the same 
vein, and which contains the well-known lines — " Such 
grief was ours, it seems but yesterday." In his re- 
maining poems, the border into the milder forms of 
romance is definitely crossed ; and, like other poets of 
the Eegency, Eogers pays his tribute to the novel 
in verse. His best, however, was reserved till last. 
In Italy he strikes into a new metre and an entirely 
new manner. His blank verse is as limpid as his 
rhymed couplet ; and the greater freedom of its move- 
ment, working with other influences, allows scope for 
qualities of which his poetry had hitherto shown no 
trace ; a keen, and often humorous, observation of life 
and manners ; a clear eye for the significant features 
of landscape ; a power to seize the essentials of historic 
events or local traditions. His choice of subject, as 
was perhaps inevitable, at times recalls the later work 



48 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of Byron, though it is by no means certain that the 
greater poet could have claimed priority. In one or 
two passages, his manner faintly anticipates that of 
Browning, the Browning of My Last Duchess. He has 
not the dramatic grip of the later writer, but his sense 
of what is characteristic is sound, as far as it goes, and 
he has something of the same brevity. The real im- 
portance of these affinities is to show that even those 
who were reckoned as champions of the classical 
tradition, were carried by the force of their surround- 
ings into the current of Eomance. 

Campbell, as has been said, struck the classical 
note, at starting, more frankly than either of the 
preceding poets. The Pleasures of Hope 
(1799), the subject of which was clearly 
suggested by Rogers, is perhaps the last poem of 
any importance written on the classical model. More 
polished even than its prototype, and with a cer- 
tain coldness of which that could by no means be 
accused, it is essentially a glorified prize-poem; and 
the number of its proverbial lines — one at least of 
them, alas ! pilfered— does not go to clear it of this 
character. His later poetry is in a curiously differ- 
ent manner, and it gives a far higher impression 
of his powers. It is almost entirely the work of a 
romantic poet, — a romantic poet with a turn for 
battles and sea-fights. Ye Mariners of England 
(1800) and The Battle of the Baltic (1805) are ablaze 
with the spirit of Nelson and his sea-dogs; and, in 
their own kind, there is nothing equal to them in the 
language. The Battle of Hohenlinden, written between 



BKITAIN. 49 

the two sea-songs (1802), is perhaps still finer as a 
poem. It is as vivid ; it is far deeper in its suggestion 
of the horrors of battle ; and the opening contrast 
between the calm of nature and the trampling of 
warriors and the garments rolled in blood strikes a 
sombre note which is heard again and again to the 
very close. To the same year belongs LochieVs Warn- 
ing, which — with a different, though kindred, motive 
— may be held to dispute the palm with Hohenlinden. 
In his remaining poems he turns to the softer side of 
romance, and here his best achievement is Lord Ullin's 
Daughter} a ballad finer than any written in that 
generation of British poets, if we set aside the master- 
pieces of Scott ; yet, even here, there is a beat of the 
hard, metallic ring from which his poetry is seldom 
free. A more elaborate venture in something of the 
same field is Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), a red Indian 
tale, the matter of which is akin to that of Words- 
worth's Ruth, while its stanza, the Spenserian, was in 
all probability suggested by The Female Vagrant. But 
neither Wordsworth, nor any other writer, could ever 
have been eager to claim parentage. For the poem, 
like the later Theodric (1824), is singularly feeble. 
On the whole, Campbell seems to have left on his 
contemporaries the impression that his powers were 
greater than his performance, and that his reputation 
would have stood higher if he had not .been so shy of 
risking it. 

Thus the classical revival, which bulked so largely 

1 Published in 1804 ; written about the same time as the Pleasures 
of Hope. 

D 



50 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

in the eyes of Byron, in fact amounted to very little. 
No one of its authors had any serious quarrel with the 
romantic tendencies of the time. All of them came to 
be more and more deeply penetrated by those tend- 
encies as years went on. The use of the heroic couplet 
was, in truth, the one badge of the alleged reaction ; 
and even that, though for obvious reasons retained to 
the end by Crabbe, was eventually deserted both by 
Eogers and Campbell. It is true, however, that the 
names of those three men mark a certain slackening 
in the onward movement of romance. We now return 
to the full tide of that movement with the publication 
of Lyrical Ballads, 

From Thomson to Burns and Blake the reaction 
against the ideals and methods of classical poetry 
Lyrical had persistently grown in strength. A 
Baiiads. new wor id f son g h a( j been silently 
built up, before which the classical models paled 
into insignificance. But, in the main, the revolt had 
been carried out in silence. With the exception of 
Blake, few or none of its authors had troubled them- 
selves to declare open war upon the poetic creed 
which they denied. The Lyrical Ballads (1798), 
with its successive Advertisements, Prefaces, and 
Appendices from the hand of Wordsworth (published 
respectively in 1798, 1800, 1802, 1815), may be re- 
garded as such a declaration. " Both by precept and 
example" they raise the standard of open revolt 
against the school of Pope. And that is one of their 
many claims to mark an epoch in literary history. 



BRITAIN. 51 

With the details of Wordsworth's theory of " poetic 
diction " we are not concerned. His statement of it 
was strangely maladroit, and in some respects con- 
veyed an impression exactly the contrary of that 
which was intended. In appearance, it swept away 
the distinction between poetry and prose. In reality, 
it was a plea for the emancipation of poetry ; for a 
riddance of the bondage which had reduced it to 
something hardly distinguishable from rhymed and 
stilted prose ; for a return to the passion and vivid- 
ness which the Augustans had banished alike from 
its language and its thought. 

This was not the first time that either Words- 
worth or Coleridge had appeared in print. Both 
Previous poetry had been known to the public for some 
of coieHdge. y ears • an( } known for qualities which 
the modern reader finds some difficulty in recog- 
nising as their own. Coleridge (1772-1834), whose 
later poetry is more fastidiously distilled than that 
of any other Englishman, was notorious for the 
" turgid ode and tumid stanza/' of which Byron was 
to make sport in his youthful satire. He had, in 
fact, written nothing better than the Ode on the 
Departing Year (1796) and a considerable number 
of sonnets, none of which can be said to rise above 
mediocrity. All these betray the romantic ferment 
which was working among the younger poets of the 
time. But they have nothing of the imaginative 
genius, and nothing of the unerring craftsmanship, 
which belong to the poems written in and after 
1797, the year of his first unbroken intercourse 



59 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

with Wordsworth, and which were first revealed to 
the world in the fateful volume of 1798. It is 
enough to stamp his earlier work that the god of 
his idolatry at that time was the romantic, but 
insipid, Bowles. 

Bowles (1762-1850)— if a short account of his work 
may be inserted here — was a poet whose importance 
influence of mainly consists in his influence on Cole- 
Bowks. r idgQ and, to a less degree, on Wordsworth ; 
and it is his earliest work, Fourteen Sonnets (1789), 
ultimately increased to thirty, which earned this dis- 
tinction. The sonnets are lax in form, but, like all 
Bowies' poetry, they have an undeniable charm of 
rhythm. They are, perhaps, too much in the nature 
of an itinerary ; and, with the exception of one on 
the Cherwell, are strangely lacking in the sense of 
scenery. But what took Coleridge captive was their 
obviously romantic intention, and the strain of pen- 
sive sentiment — of "mild and manliest melancholy," 
as he not very aptly called it — which runs through 
them. The reminiscences of Spenser and of Milton's 
earlier poems, of Collins and Cowper, which abound 
in them, are also significant of the poet's bent. In 
after years, Bowles seems to have come to a fuller 
consciousness of his own aims and ideals. Some of 
his later poetry — a description of tropical scenery, 
for instance, in The Missionary of the Andes (1815) 
— is curiously minute and, what is more, singularly 
beautiful in its local colouring. And it is the 
romantic leaning implied in these qualities that 
prompted him to the attack on Pope (1806) which 



BRITAIN. 53 

so deeply stirred the spleen of Byron. Thus, of 
the poets actually writing when Coleridge was a 
youth at school and college, it is intelligible enough 
that Bowles — for of Burns at that time he seems 
to have known nothing — should have stood out as 
the rising hope of the romantic cause. 

With Wordsworth (1770-1850) the case is still 
stranger. It is not merely that his powers were 
Previous V oetry undeveloped, but that they took a direc- 
oj Wordsworth. tion the very pp 0S i te of that which was 

his true bent. The Descriptive Sketches (1793) have 
all the contortions and all the "glossy, unfeeling 
diction" of the most extreme disciple of the school 
of Pope. It is true that both they and the Evening 
Walk, written a few years earlier, contain touches of 
nature and a sense of the life in nature which fore- 
shadow the real Wordsworth of the Tintern poem 
and the Prelude, It was such things which caused 
Coleridge, then at Cambridge, to conclude that " a 
new star had risen above the literary horizon." But 
to most readers it must have appeared that the new 
poet was mainly remarkable for the most pious de- 
votion to the orthodox couplet, and the most righteous 
reluctance to call a spade a spade. 

Of the work composed in the interval between 
1793 and 1797 the public knew nothing. But it 
is the work which, more than any other except the 
Prelude, bears the stamp of the mental conflict 
through which Wordsworth passed during the later 
stages of the French Eevolution ; and it is the work 
which gives the key to the achievement of the ten 



54 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

years of his poetic prime. It consists of three poems, 
— two of which, at least, are among the most remark- 
able that he ever wrote, — Guilt and Sorrotv (part 
of which survives, under its original form, in the 
Female Vagrant), written at intervals between 1791 
and 1794, Lines left under a Yew-tree (1795), and 
Tlie Borderers, his one excursion into the drama 
(1795-96). All these are full of the sense of mystery 
in nature, of the tears in human things, which form 
the groundwork of his later poetry. And they ring 
with an indignant pity for "what man has made of 
man," which, if it has not altogether faded out of 
his later work, has at least left little more than a 
softened echo. It is significant, moreover, that they 
have little or nothing of that exaggerated simplicity 
of diction, which was to raise the hue and cry against 
the poems of 1797 and 1798. 

Thus, to the world at large, the Lyrical Ballads 
came as a revelation. The Ancient Mariner on the 
Desi n of one h an d> ^e Tintern poem, the Female 
Lyrical Vagrant, the Yew-tree, and some of what 
may fairly be called the "dramatic lyrics " 
on the other, struck notes which were entirely new to 
English poetry. It was inevitable that the first im- 
pression should be one of contrast between the two 
writers rather than of resemblance. The one is the 
incarnation of the romantic spirit; the other, to all 
appearance, was the most uncompromising of realists. 
It is well, therefore, to remember that what Coleridge 
rather insists upon is the essential unity of aim, which 
lay behind these divergences of method and manner ; 



BRITAIN. 55 

and that, while professedly describing the object he 
had proposed to himself in the Ancient Mariner, he 
insensibly uses the same terms which, in the next 
breath, he applies specifically to the poetry of Words- 
worth. 1 This is said without prejudice to the glaring 
differences which undoubtedly exist between the two 
poets. But it serves to recall a side of Wordsworth's 
genius which has too often been allowed to drop out 
of sight. 

The value of Wordsworth's contribution to the 
little volume has been hotly contested. About that 
Ancient of Coleridge there can be no manner of 
Mariner, doubt. N or can there be any doubt about 
the particular quality of imagination which it dis- 
plays. With the Ancient Mariner we are in the full 
tide of the romantic triumph. Scenery, colouring, 
supernatural motive, the rapidity of the action, the 
fiery touch with which the successive images are 
burnt into the brain of the wedding-guest — and which 
of us has not stood in his place ? — all these are of the 
quintessence of romance. Apart from certain passages 
of Keats, there is no poem in the language — there is 
none, perhaps, in the literature of Europe — so in- 
stinct with all that is deepest and truest in romance 
as this ballad. Compare it with such a poem as 
Burger's Lenore or the Kehama of Southey ; compare 
it even with the Isabella of Keats, and we see at 
once how Coleridge has instinctively turned away 
from all that is merely external or mechanical in 
the romantic armoury, and has thrown himself boldly 

1 See Biographia Literaria, chap. xiv. (1817). 



56 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

upon the weapons of the spirit. Even the super- 
natural horror, poignant as it is, is in no sense an 
end in itself. The heart of the poem lies in the 
"dramatic truth of the emotions" which an experi- 
ence so unearthly could not fail to awaken, "sup- 
posing it to be real " ; the experience of the " soul 
that hath been alone on a wide, wide sea," haunted 
by the curse of the spirit-world, surrounded by the 
bodies of those his own act had brought to death. 
The removal of the more material touches of horror 
in the later draft of the ballad is evidence, if further 
evidence were needed, of the true intention of the 
poet. 

The other romantic poems of Coleridge — Kuhla 

Khan, Christdbel, and The Dark Ladie with its 

Coleridge's prelude, Love — were written within a few 

other poe™. yeargj f()r the mogt paft within ft few 

months, of the Ancient Mariner. The two former, 
and more characteristic, pieces may be said to sever 
the strands which are intertwined in the Ancient 
Mariner. Kubla Khan has all, and more than all, 
the vivid colouring and the haunting glamour of 
the great ballad. Christdbel 1 refines still further 
upon the subtlety of its dramatic suggestion, and 
surrounds the supernatural theme with a haze of 
mystery which stands out in sharp contrast against 
the more direct and, as it has seemed to some, the 
cruder methods of the earlier poem. Moreover, in 
the verse of the earlier poem there is little or 
nothing of the calculated delicacy of movement, the 

1 Parti., 1798. Part II., 1800. 



BRITAIN. ,, 57 

variation with each varying mood of thought or feel- 
ing, which runs from end to end of Christabel. It 
is inevitable that the latter should have the defects 
of its great qualities. The atmosphere throughout is 
more confined. The iron gate of the Gothic castle, the 
filigree work of the lady's chamber, are poor substi- 
tutes for the boundless horizon and the wide sea, of 
which the Mariner himself seemed to have become a 
living part. " I pass like night from land to land," — 
there is nothing in Christabel which strikes so deep 
as this. The supernatural theme, which forms the 
groundwork of both poems, is here presented under 
the narrower associations of time and place ; and 
Coleridge approaches perilously near to the province 
which Scott and Southey were making, or soon to 
make, their own. It is perhaps needless to seek a 
reason why any work of Coleridge's was left un- 
finished ; that was the normal fate of everything 
to which he set his hand. But in this case it may 
well be that the superhuman effort to escape from 
the trivial round of romance, as trodden by these 
and other writers, proved too great a burden even 
for the genius which had conceived and perfected 
the Ancient Mariner. Finished or unfinished, the 
second part of Christabel, if we except, as we are 
entitled to do, the great ode on Dejection (1802), 
was practically the swan - song of that marvellous 
genius. After 1802 a few fragments — some of them, 
truly, of supreme beauty — were all that it gave 
forth. 

Of Wordsworth's contributions to the Lyrical 



ti EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Ballads it is necessary to distinguish three several 
Wordsworth's groups. The first of these, the two poems 
contributions. WT [^ en prior to his meeting with Cole- 
ridge, has been noticed already. The second, the 
"lyrical ballads'' properly so called, is that which 
gave discriminating colour to the whole volume, and, 
enforced as it was by the provocative Advertisement, 
excited the fury of Jeffrey and the later critics. The 
third, containing the Lines written above Tintern and 
some four or five other poems, is that which for 
the first time revealed Wordsworth as the "poet of 
nature." 

With the poems of the second group must be 

taken Peter Bell, which, though not published till 

more than twenty years later, was, like 

Poems of num. 

them, written in the early part of 1798. 

It has the honour of being one of the best abused 

poems in the language. But on Wordsworth's 

ideals in poetry, as they then were, it throws a 

searching light; for, as Professor Ealeigh has justly 

pointed out, it is, and was clearly designed to 

be, the Wordsworthian counterpart to the Ancient 

Mariner of Coleridge. This group — with one or 

two later pieces, such as Alice Fell — stands by 

itself in the poetry of Wordsworth. He here takes 

up the theme of human suffering and endurance 

which he had already handled in Guilt and Sorrow, 

and which, as he himself insisted, was always to 

remain " the haunt and the main region of his 

song." But he takes it up with too much of a set 

purpose; and he revels in limitations of diction, 



BRITAIN. 59 

theme, and circumstance which must be admitted 
often to have laid heavy shackles upon his genius. 
The Anecdote for Fathers and the Idiot Boy, old 
Farmer Simpson and Goody Blake— what have these 
to do with the "spontaneous overflow of powerful 
feelings," or indeed with any conceivable definition 
of poetry ? But, after all, the worst that can be said 
against them has been forestalled by Wordsworth 
himself. "I may have given to things a false im- 
portance, I may have sometimes written upon un- 
worthy subjects. ... My language, too," — and this 
he is still more ready to admit — "may frequently 
have suffered from those arbitrary connections of 
feelings and ideas with particular words and phrases 
from which no man can altogether protect himself." 
This surely is in itself enough to disarm criticism. 
And, if it be objected by the profane that this did 
not lead him, until years had passed, to suppress 
or alter any of the offending passages, the answer 
is that it would have been well if poets had 
always shown the same dignity in the face of critics. 
Wordsworth was right in holding that, " where the 
understanding of an author is not convinced," such 
changes cannot be made " without great injury to 
himself. Tor his own feelings are his stay and sup- 
port ; and, if he set them aside in one instance, he 
may be induced to repeat this act till his mind 
shall lose all confidence in itself, and become utterly 
debilitated." 

And, when all abatement has been made, what a 
world of imagination is opened by The Thorn, or if 



60 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

obvious blemishes be held to put that poem out of 
court, by The Mad Mother, The Forsaken Indian 
Woman, and We are Seven. When had this note 
been struck before in English poetry, and when has 
it been struck since ? What other poet has seized 
with so close a grip the stern tragedy of the country- 
side, the bond which binds man in his suffering to 
nature, the force which drives him to seek both balm 
and poison in the scenes where misery has fallen on 
his life ? The very austerity of the language — though 
there are passages, especially in The Thorn, where 
austerity is by no means the dominant quality — is 
suited, as more ornate language could never have 
been, to the severity of the theme. This, and not its 
supposed identity with the language of the " middle 
and lower classes of society," is its true justification. 
It is true that, in this respect as in others, the poet 
has not yet gained absolute mastery of his weapons. 
It was not until the poems of the two following years 
that he found himself completely. 

Compare the poems written during or after his 
visit to Germany (1798-99), and we are at once 

Pastorals conscious of the difference. In Lucy Qray 
and Ruth (1799), in the Leech -gatherer 
(1802), or the Affliction of Margaret (1804), there 
is the same austerity of thought and imaginative 
touch. But the crudeness of the earlier poems, 
tlu;ir insistence on outward circumstance, has van- 
ished; and there is a dainty grace of language and 
of rhythmical movement which is a new thing in 
the form of Wordsworth's poetry, and which exactly 



BRITAIN. 61 

renders the change that had come over its spirit. 
His grip of facts is not loosened; his stern present- 
ment of them is hardly softened; but, with diction 
and rhythm, both are idealised and transformed. 
The same thing, but with a difference, is true of the 
three Pastorals (1800), though it must be remembered 
that one of them, the Story of Margaret, 1 was in part 
composed before the year of the Lyrical Ballads, at the 
same period as the Tew -tree and Guilt and Sorrow. 
Written in blank verse, they necessarily differ, both 
in diction and in rhythmical quality, from the more 
lyrical pieces to which, in subject, they belong. But 
nowhere has Wordsworth grasped the tragedy of 
peasant life more closely, nowhere has he handled it 
with more poignant fidelity, than here. In the two 
greatest of these poems, in Margaret and Michael, there 
are pages, there are single lines, which have gathered 
into themselves the crushing, speechless sorrow of 
years. 

If the six years following his return from France 

(1792-98) form the turning-point in the history of 

Wordsworth's inward growth, it is 1799 

Poems 0/1799. 

which is the crucial year in the develop- 
ment of his poetic powers. To that year belong, 
beside the pieces already mentioned, the Poet's 
Epitaph and the series of poems concerning the 
ideal Lucy. And it is in them that, if we except 
the Tintern lines and one or two of the nature- 
poems in Lyrical Ballads, his genius first shows itself 
in its full strength ; unshackled by the defiant theory 

1 It is to be found in the first book of The Excursion. 



EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of the previous year, untroubled by the breath of 
realism which that theory had carried in its train. 
The " sojourn among unknown men/' though it has 
been set down as barren of results, did that inestim- 
able service to the poet. It gave to the life and 
scenes, among which his spirit never ceased to linger, 
just that touch of remoteness which, to so brooding a 
genius as his, was the one thing needful before they 
could be lifted from the region of bald fact into the 
golden light of the ideal. 

But it is time to return to the third and last 
group of poems contained in the Lyrical Ballads, 

Poems of the poems of nature. In this field, it 

nature nee( j hardly be said, Wordsworth is at 
least as original as in his poetry of man. And in 
this field, as we have seen, he reached his full 
strength, he found the secret of complete harmony 
between thought and expression, between form and 
matter, earlier than in the other. In no poem 
that he ever wrote is he more true to himself, in 
none is the correspondence between form and sub- 
stance more spontaneous and absolute, than in the 
Lines written above Tintern, and In Early Spring, in 
Expostulation and Reply, and the companion piece, 
The Tables Turned ; or, finally, in the poem beginning 
" It is the first mild day of March.'' Within the next 
few years these poems may have been equalled. But 
it Ls certain they were never surpassed. 

What, then, is it that Wordsworth did for the poetry 
of nature ? Wherein lies his strength as the poet of 
nature ? He opened for man a new bodily sense, and 



BRITAIN. 63 

he opened for him a new spiritual sense. And through 
these two channels — but, in the last resort, the two 
merge into one — he brought man nearer to nature than 
any other poet has done, before or since. It is not 
only that his eye for the " outward shows of sky and 
earth " was marvellously keen ; in this he may have 
been rivalled, and even excelled, by later poets — 
poets who, like Coleridge, had trained their vision by 
his. It is not even that these things came to him 
charged, merely as outward shows, with a deeper sig- 
nificance than they have borne to others. It is that 
behind the outward forms of nature he was conscious 
of an abiding spirit, full of joy itself and an ever- 
flowing fountain of joy for the man who, " in a wise 
passiveness," has schooled himself to " see into the life 
of things," for the heart that is willing " to watch and 
to receive/' 

It is this " deep power of joy " which Wordsworth 
found in nature, and which he brought to nature, 

wordswmiji's that makes his secret and his strength. 

joy m nature. Ifc jg jj^ as Coleridge saw, 1 that gave 

" the strong music in his soul " and in the inspired 
moments of his utterance. And it is just this joy 
which has remained an impenetrable mystery to 
so many of his critics, who have persisted in re- 
garding the utterances of such inspired moments 
as " half - playful sallies " ; " charming " as mere 
"poetry," but, if taken seriously, no better than the 

1 See the Ode on Dejection, which was originally addressed to 
Wordsworth. Hence the allusion at the end to the " little child " 
{Lucy Gray), afterwards unhappily transferred to Otway. 



64 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ravings of a fanatic. Wordsworth, however, knew 
precisely what he meant; so do those — certainly 
not a diminishing, probably an increasing, number 
— for whom he wrote. He knew with certainty 
that joy is at once the mainspring and the crown 
of all human effort. He knew with no less cer- 
tainty that nothing can keep the heart of man 
so open to the visitings of joy, that nothing can 
strengthen so deeply his power to receive it, as 
the habit of communion with nature. Hence there 
is no playfulness, there is literal truth, in the asser- 
tion so often challenged — 

" One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can." 

It is not only that, in the presence of nature, all that 
is base or sordid in the heart of man sinks rebuked. 
It is that, in her presence, his " soul is tuned to love " 
and joy ; that, in her life and beauty, he has glimpses 
of the same Spirit whose working he knows also in 
himself; the Spirit 

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean, and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man." 

In one form or another, such instincts are the 

common heritage of humanity. They are implicit 

personal note in some of the oldest poetry; they lie 

in these poems. ftt the ^^ of pr i m i t i ve mythology. And, 

if they find their fullest expression in some dozen 



BRITAIN. 65 

poems of Wordsworth, it is because what others 
have seen as in a glass darkly to him was as 
clear as daylight ; what others have known only 
in exceptional moments was to him matter of daily, 
hourly experience. It is true that he had the gift 
of poetic utterance which is denied to others. But 
it is also true that this gift was strangely limited 
in its operation, — -limited to those matters in which 
his own heart was strongly stirred. And, wherever 
we find him rising to his full height as a poet, we 
may be very sure that he had felt deeply as a man. 
Whatever may be the case with other poets, of Words- 
worth at any rate it is certain that he sang well of 
nothing save what he himself had lived. It would be 
hard to name any singer who has so thrown his very 
heart and soul into his poetry, whose best song is so 
completely the reflection of himself. And that per- 
haps is the reason why those who have felt his poetry 
at all have felt it with so passionate — and, it must be 
added, at times so indiscriminating — a devotion. They 
have felt that it touched not only their imagination, 
but the deepest springs of their life. And, as men 
will with their sacred books, they have come to regard 
every chapter as inspired. In fact, there are few poets 
with whom inspiration is so fitful. But, if there be 
any theme on which he seldom sinks below the best, 
it is the healing, gladdening power of nature. 

The bulk of what is vital in Wordsworth's poetry, 

Patriotic at whatever time it may have been 

sonnets. written, falls under the two heads which 

have been considered in connection with the Lyrical 

E 



66 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Ballads. It is the poetry either of peasant life or 
of external nature. There is, however, one group 
which stands entirely apart. That is the Sonnets, 
inspired by the struggle against Napoleon, and com- 
posed between 1802 and 1807. They open with 
the sonnet on The Extinction of the Venetian Re- 
public, " Once did she hold the gorgeous East in 
fee," and they close with that on the subjection 
of Switzerland, "Two voices are there"; an open- 
ing and a close worthy of the noblest scroll of 
patriotic poetry in our language. 

The link which binds the "Sonnets on national 
Independence" to the main body of Wordsworth's 
poetry is not difficult to seize. In reaction against 
the reasoned ideals of the French Eevolution, and 
still more against the arid pedantry of Godwin, he 
had thrown himself on the primitive instincts of the 
human heart ; those instincts which are " permanent " 
just because they are " obscure and dark " ; which 
defy all change just because they admit of no reasoned 
explanation ; and which " have the nature of infinity." 
Among these instincts are those which he took for 
the theme of the Pastorals and the Lyrical Ballads. 
Among them also is the love of country ; the passion, 
above reason and contemptuous of consequences, 
which drives men to fight for the hills and streams 
among which they were born, for the tradition which 
has been handed down to them from generation to 
generation. The thought of country was dear to 
Wordsworth in itself. It was perhaps dearer yet 
because in national freedom he saw the only safe- 



BKITAIN. 67 

guard for all that he held dearest in man's nature : 
the home and all the affections which twine around 
it; the sense of brotherhood which binds neighbour 
to neighbour by a thousand associations of scenes 
familiar to them from childhood ; the " natural piety " 
which nerves the will to endure the hardest blows of 
fate. And, as it is in the smaller communities that 
these bonds are felt most closely, so it is with them 
that his sympathies are keenest: with the peasants 
of Biscay and the Alps ; with those who followed 
Hofer to defend the mountains and villages of the 
Tyrol. The patriotism of Wordsworth, if, on the one 
hand, an universal patriotism, — for it is not bounded 
by passions, still less by interests, peculiar to any 
one nation, — is, on the other hand, essentially local. 
It springs from the same roots as his passion for 
the country-side and the stern pathos which hangs 
around its homesteads. In the noblest of all these 
sonnets, the sonnet on Switzerland, it is interwoven 
with memories of the ocean and the mountain-floods 
which he had sung as the poet of nature. 

After 1807 the inspiration of the poet flagged, 

though he continued to write till within a few years 

of his death, and as late as 1825 rose 

Later poems. 

once at least to a level not immeasur- 
ably below his best. But, with a few such excep- 
tions, it is true to say that what counts in his 
work was all crowded into the fifteen years fol- 
lowing his return from France (1793-1807); and 
that, if he had died at the same age as Byron, the 
world, except for the nobility of his life, would not 



68 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

have been sensibly the poorer. When, in 1843, he 
was made Laureate, it was with no expectation that 
he would fulfil the duties of the post; and he was 
mercifully spared the humiliation of New Year Odes, of 
Threnodies, of Royal Progresses, which his predecessor, 
Southey, had obediently turned out. The Crown 
honoured itself yet more than him by the appoint- 
ment; and we are free to forget that he was ever 
anything but the poet of humanity and nature. 

Eeverting to the modest volume which first revealed 
his greatness and that of Coleridge to those who were 
capable of judging, we have now only to ask what was 
its bearing upon the literary movement of the time. 

As to the place of Coleridge in that movement 

there can be no manner of doubt. He was, heart 

and soul, the poet of romance. The first 

the public page of the Ancient Mariner was enough 
o en ge ^ establish that beyond all possibility of 
dispute. It is, however, tolerably clear that to 
romance of this order the public of 1798 was not 
only indifferent, but hostile. There seems to be some 
truth in Wordsworth's complaint, though he was per- 
haps the last man who could gracefully make it, that 
the " failure " of the Lyrical Ballads was, at least in 
part, due to the unpopularity of the Ancient Mariner. 
Even so friendly a judge as Lamb " disliked all the 
miraculous parts of it"; Southey, like the public, 
would have none of it. Strangely enough, it was 
Christabel, with its far subtler cadences and its far 
greater elaboration of romantic effect, that first won 
the suffrages, at least of the initiated. Here, as 



BRITAIN. 69 

we have seen, Coleridge in some respects followed 
the beaten road of romance more nearly than in 
his earlier effort. And we can hardly be wrong 
in supposing that it was this rather than its more 
elusive qualities that caught the fancy of men like 
Byron and Scott. However that may be, it is cer- 
tain that in its unpublished state Christabel made 
a deep impression upon both these poets, and its in- 
fluence on the Lay of the Last Minstrel, on a famous 
passage of Childe Harold, and, in spite of the author's 
disclaimer, on the opening lines of the Siege of Corinth, 
is apparent. Franked by such sponsors, Christabel, 
when at last published (1816), met with a far more 
cordial reception than its predecessor, though the 
Edinburgh and the Examiner, perhaps the critics in 
general, still retained their contemptuous frown. But 
the hour of Eomance was now fully come, and the 
phantom ship of Coleridge was towed into harbour by 
the rougher craft of Byron and Scott. 

Something of the same hesitation was shown by 
the public of the day in making up its mind about 
and words- Wordsworth. The cry of childishness and 
worth. affected singularity seems to have been 
an afterthought, largely the invention of Jeffrey, 
who, however, did not deliver sentence until 1807. 
At the moment of publication the test-poems seem 
to have passed without serious challenge. The re- 
viewers — and Fox, in his letter of 1801, was sub- 
stantially at one with them — spoke with some 
benevolence of The Thorn, The Ldiot Boy, and even 
of Goody Blake. On the other hand, the far greater 



70 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

poems, those which came from the writer's very heart, 
were left almost entirely without notice — " It is the 
first mild day of March " and the lines above Tintern ; 
just as Fox, in the letter referred to, was forced to 
admit his indifference to Michael and The Brothers. 
After Jeffrey had spoken the tide turned heavily 
against Wordsworth, and for many years, though his 
influence must steadily have grown with the discern- 
ing few, his name to the general public was a byword. 
And in a certain sense that public deserves our 
sympathy. For even now the position of Wordsworth 
Wordsworth's is not altogether easy to determine. So 
realism. many strands mingle in his genius that 
it is hard to disentangle them. The vein of re- 
alism which appears in the Ballads of 1798 has 
been sometimes taken for more than it is worth. 
The truth is that after that year it sinks beneath 
the surface, and in his later poetry hardly requires 
to be reckoned with. Moreover, alike in intention 
and in method, it is something very different from 
such realism as Crabbe's. The latter is so intent on 
the misery of life, that he has small attention left 
for the nobler qualities it calls out. His eye is fixed 
so rigidly on the sordid side of man's lot, that he 
fails to see the light which touches and irradiates it. 
Hence, in order to drive home the squalor of things, 
he tends to multiply details, till the imagination, so 
far from being roused, is fairly stunned by their im- 
portunity. He paints one corner of the wood rather 
than the whole, and he paints that one corner so 
minutely that the wood can hardly be seen for the 



BRITAIN. 71 

trees. The fault of Wordsworth, on the other hand, 
is not over-minuteness, but irrelevancy, of detail. His 
choice of subject, when most ill-judged, is prompted 
not by love of squalor but by a belief, mistaken enough 
in some cases, that he had found the secret of touching 
common things to the finer issues of imaginative inter- 
pretation. His " realism," in fact, needs to be fenced 
round with so many qualifications that, strictly speak- 
ing, it cannot be called realism at all. 

Again, there is beyond dispute a strain of romance 

in the genius of Wordsworth. But here, too, it is 

necessary to distinguish. His romance is 

His romance. 

never that of the supernatural; nor, again, 
is it the romance of stirring incident or adventure. 
" The moving accident is not my trade " — the 
whole body of his poetry bears witness to the truth 
of this confession. And though he had a curious 
art in suggesting supernatural effects, he is punctili- 
ous in avoiding the use of supernatural machinery. 
Peter Bell and, to take less disputable instances, 
the opening scene of Guilt and Sorrow and more 
than one passage in the earlier books of the Pre- 
lude, are proof positive how easily he might have 
surrendered himself to supernatural influences, had 
not his will been firmly set against it. As it is, 
such passages stand by themselves in rendering the 
sense of supernatural awe which has none but purely 
natural causes to inspire it. 

But if the romanticism of Wordsworth does not lie 
in adventure nor — save with the limitations just indi- 
cated — in the supernatural; if it does not lie in a 



72 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

genius for evoking the past nor in the magic which 
calls before us the men and scenes of distant lands ; 
what direction, it may be asked, is there left for it to 
seek ? The answer is that, though he does not, like 
Scott, live habitually in the past, and though his 
imagination does not instinctively turn, as that of 
Moore and Byron turned, to remote regions, yet there 
is no poet who, on occasion, has more truly rendered 
the innermost feeling of the past; there is none, at 
the rare moments when the impulse took him, who has 
portrayed so vividly, if not the human passions, at 
least the natural sights and sounds of a far country. 
Where shall we find the martial note of the Middle 
Ages more boldly struck than in the opening passage 
of the Feast of Brougham Castle ? Where the wistful 
memory of the last struggles of a dying race more 
faithfully echoed than in the song of the Eeaper, 

mourning 

" For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
And battles long ago " ? 

Again, the " crackling flashes " of the Northern Lights 
in the Forsaken Indian Woman ; the nightingale 
chanting " to weary bands of travellers " in the oasis 
of the desert ; the cuckoo " breaking the silence of 
the seas Among the farthest Hebrides " ; the white 
doe gliding through the ivied arch ; the " fairy crowds 
of islands" in the boundless lakes of Canada; the 
tropical forests of Georgia, and the trailing wreaths of 
scarlet blossom that "cover a hundred leagues and 
seem To set the hills on fire " — what are all these but 
the very essence of romance ? It is true that in most 



BRITAIN. 73 

or all of these poems some turn is ultimately given 
which, of set purpose, takes off the edge of the roman- 
tic impression. But the romance is there, for all that, 
an element essential to the general effect of the poem, 
though it may not, and does not, dominate the whole. 
Nor is it only in the choice of theme or episode for a 
given poem that the romantic impulse can be traced. 
It flashes upon us now and again where we should 
least expect it ; in a chance simile or metaphor that 
has found its way into the most rapt meditations of 
the poet and betrays the hidden bent of his imagina- 
tion ; in the image of the " pliant harebell swinging in 
the breeze Of some grey rock," and then torn from its 
birthplace and "tossed about in whirlwind"; in the 
line which struck an answering chord in the heart of 
Lamb, " Calm is all nature, as a resting wheel " ; in a 
score of other instances no less impalpable, but no less 
unmistakable, than these. 

It is in the Prelude (1799-1805) that the romantic 

strain reveals itself most clearly, and perhaps in its 

most distinctive form. It is not merely 

The Prelude. . . . J 

that the spirit of the boyish poet was 
fed, as he there tells us, on the visions of romance ; 
that he turned by preference, and from the first, to 
such storehouses of fantasy as the Faerie Queene and 
the Arabian Nights. Nor is it merely that his 
whole youth was passed in an atmosphere of ad- 
venture ; adventure homely enough, no doubt, in 
its outward semblance, but charged with all the 
effects that incidents far more recondite could have 
had upon his spirit. It is all this ; but it is much 



74 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

more. The sense of awe, to which reference has 
been made already, played a part in the moulding 
of his temper and imagination far larger and more 
significant than it has done with most men, or even 
with the majority of romantic poets. So that, looking 
back, he could point to these and like memories as the 
determining influence upon his growth, and speak of 
himself as bred " among the shining streams Of faery 
land, the forest of romance." It is, of course, true 
that the visionary strain in his nature was always 
met and controlled by the sane instinct, the deepest 
and strongest thing in him, which kept his feet firmly 
planted on the earth. " I cannot write without a body 
of thought" l wailed the great romanticist in one of his 
early letters, though in after years he learned better. 
Wordsworth found, and it was his strength to find, 
the same impossibility to the end of his days ; and he 
would have added that he could neither write nor live 
without a body of fact Hence the persistent impulse 
to bring his most airy visions into connection with 
fact; the craving to embody them, if possible, in 
abiding realities. It was this that drew him, as a 
magnet, to the French Eevolution. For there, spring- 
ing straight out of the solid earth, he found "the 
attraction of a country in romance." There his visions 
seemed at last to realise themselves — 

" Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, . . . 
But in the very world which is the world 
Of all of us, the place where in the end 
We find our happiness, or not at all." 



1 Coleridge to Southey, December 11, 1794 : Letters, i. 112. 



BRITAIN. 75 

For, after all, it is neither in romance nor in realism 
that the true strength of Wordsworth is to be sought. 
In his most characteristic work he is to be classed 
with no school, to be described by no literary catch- 
word. To take the " common things that round us lie," 
and to show the intrinsic beauty which the " thinking 
heart " has power to discern in them ; to idealise these 
things not by shedding over them "the light that 
never was on sea or land," but by drawing out of 
them the light which belongs to their very nature, — 
this was the task which he set himself, and this is the 
task which, in the inspired moments of his poetry, he 
must be held to have performed. It is a task which 
clearly has affinities on the one hand with the work of 
the realist, and on the other with the aims and prompt- 
ings of romance. But the fusion of the two elements 
has entirely altered the distinctive character of each. 
The result is something as different from the bare 
reproduction of familiar things, which is the mark of 
realism, as it is from the presentation of a world re- 
mote from ordinary experience, which is among the 
functions of romance. 

After Wordsworth and Coleridge, but at an im- 
measurable distance, we naturally come to Southey 
(1774-1843), who was bound to both by 
close ties of comradeship and good offices; 
to Coleridge, it must be confessed, by offices ren- 
dered rather than received. His own estimate of 
his poetry was certainly extravagant ; but, no less 
certainly, it has now fallen into undeserved neglect. 



76 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

And apart from its intrinsic merits, which are very- 
considerable, it has an importance in the history 
of the romantic movement which it is unjust to 
overlook. The metrical experiments of his earlier 
poetry, his Sapphics and dactylics, have no value, 
except the undesigned one of provoking the scoffs 
of Byron and the parodies of Canning. But they 
at least testify, if in somewhat perverse fashion, 
to the hatred of traditional shackles which was part 
and parcel of the romantic temper. And there are 
other qualities which brought him better luck at the 
time and made him a conspicuous figure in the 
romantic revolt. The love of vivid colour and un- 
familiar scenery, the passion of adventure, the lab- 
oured quest of the supernatural, — all these strike us 
at the first glance; and they strike us the more, 
because the shape in which they appear is so cur- 
iously crude. What in Coleridge has been passed 
and repassed through the refiner's fire, in Southey 
remains to the last as little more than the raw 
material. The elements, which fused at the magic 
touch of Coleridge, in Southey stand out obtrusively 
distinct. The inner spirit of romanticism is, no doubt, 
largely lost ; but the hidden mechanism is laid bare. 

This is not to say that in much of his poetry, both 
early and late, Southey does not succeed in striking 
the romantic note to excellent effect. He does so in 
many of his early Ballads (1796-1802), which are 
based on the popular legends of England, Germany, 
Spain, and Finland, and of which the best are perhaps 
Donica (Finland), Rudiger (a version of the Lohengrin 



BRITAIN. 77 

story), and Lord William (English). He does so still 
more in his Epics, which laid a yet wider area — 
France, Spain, Wales, America, Arabia, India — under 
contribution; the best being those devoted to the 
two last countries, Thalaba (1801) and the Curse of 
Kehama (1810). Both these were written — and the 
same thing is true of Madoc — in fulfilment of a 
design conceived at school, of "rendering every 
mythology the basis of a narrative poem." Poetry 
so encyclopaedic, and composed in malice so prepense, 
could hardly be of the best. The wonder is that it 
should reach so high a level as much of it assuredly 
does. The truth is that Southey had a lavish com- 
mand of colour and sentiment, a keen eye for effect 
and, what has often been sadly lacking to English 
poets, a genius for telling a story. The adventures of 
Thalaba are exciting enough; but Kehama is one of 
the most thrilling tales that have ever been told. The 
more romantic the theme, the better was it suited to 
the poet's powers. In less fantastic subjects, such 
as Madoc 1 and Roderick (1805, 1814), he cannot be 
said to have won anything approaching to the same 
success. 

The merits of these poems naturally carry with 
them the corresponding defects. They are too long; 
the sentiment is often obvious, sometimes mis- 
placed ; the colour is not seldom laid on too thick. 
The poet, in fact, is throughout too much of the 
showman, deliberately manipulating his resources so 

1 Madoc was originally composed before Thalaba (1798-99), but 
withheld for revision and copious additions. 



78 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

that no single effect shall be lost upon the spectators. 
This is no less true of some of the ballads ; The Old 
Woman of Berkeley, for instance, where the horrors 
are so overstrained that it might well be mistaken 
for burlesque; Collier, in fact, much to the author's 
indignation, described it as a " mock - ballad." So 
imperfectly had Southey mastered the true meaning 
of the material in which he worked. 

A further illustration of this is to be found in the 
constant intrusion of elements quite alien to the spirit 
of romance; above all, in the constant displacement 
of the poet, and even of the showman, by the moralist. 
In his eagerness to enforce the teachings of virtue 
and Christianity, it happens more than once that he 
gaily throws his far-sought machinery to the winds. 
When Thalaba burls the talisman, which was to 
confound his enemies, down the gulf, he may have 
acted like a very good Christian — "the Talisman is 
Faith," — but he is a very indifferent Mussulman, 
and a still worse hero of romance. So disputable, 
with all their flow and sparkle, are the poems 
on the immortality of which Southey would at any 
moment have staked all that he possessed. He moves 
in the outer courts of the romantic temple as one to 
the manner born ; he seldom, or never, penetrates 
behind the veil. 

In his lighter moods he is less assailable ; in Lodore, 
and still more in the March to Moscow where he drew 
strength from the very bitterness of his hatred, he 
found the secret of raising doggerel almost to the level 
of poetry. His prose, again, to turn to a very different 



BRITAIN. 79 

side of his industrious activity, has many striking 
qualities. It is nervous, idiomatic, and capable, as 
at the close of Nelson, of real, if somewhat subdued, 
eloquence. His chief works in this field — apart from 
the laborious History of Brazil (1810-19) — are the 
Life of Nelson (1813), the Life of Wesley (1820), and 
the Life and Letters of Cowper (1833-37). The two 
first of these are skilful, though perhaps not very 
accurate, portraits of commanding figures ; the last, 
so far as the jealousy of others allowed him to 
make it so, is a thoroughly sound and workmanlike 
performance. 

We turn to a far greater and more unchallenged 

fame: that of Scott (1771-1832). Born in the year 

between Wordsworth and Coleridge, Scott 

Scott. . . . 

is the only writer of that generation 
whose work rivals theirs in fruitfulness and import- 
ance. It is unfortunately only the less enduring 
part of it that we are concerned with in this volume ; 
his achievement in prose -romance belongs to the 
following period. 

Scott divides with Coleridge the chief place among 
the apostles of romance. The subtler, more impalp- 

New issues able workings of the romantic spirit he 

of romance. l eaves on one gj^e . j^y ma y almost be 

said to have lain beyond his ken. But wherever 
romance touches the outer experience of man, wher- 
ever it has shown itself potent to spur him to action 
or to mould his history, there, whatever shape it 
may have taken — adventure, heroism, supernatural 
awe, — Scott was more keenly and more instinct- 



80 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ively alive to it than any of his contemporaries 
— perhaps than any man in the records of litera- 
ture. And, as could not be said of all his contem- 
poraries, with him the romantic instinct is wholly 
unforced and unaffected. It is the fusion of these two 
elements — a craving for what is remote, mysterious, 
and even fantastic on the one hand, and the practical 
sense, the love of stir and action on the other — which 
makes the distinctive colour of his genius, and which, 
thanks to the magic of that genius, gave an entirely 
new direction to the whole current of romance. Till 
the appearance of Scott, it was almost exclusively the 
subtler, more mystical elements of romance which 
had come to the surface. It was so with Blake, it 
was so with Coleridge. With Southey, it is true, the 
vein of adventure had declared itself; but not in a 
form which either had, or deserved to have, a wide 
acceptance. And, obvious as are the affinities be- 
tween Scott and Southey, the differences are far 
stronger and more significant. To Southey, adventure 
was a thing to be sought for its own sake ; and the 
more fantastic, the more highly spiced, the better. 
To Scott, after his first random beginnings, after the 
skull and cross-bones had been put aside, adventure 
was little, unless he had convinced himself that it 
was adventure which had, or at the least might have, 
happened in the actual past of history ; and nothing, 
unless it called out the qualities which he most valued 
in man's nature — energy, courage, loyalty, and the 
other virtues belonging to the stock of chivalry. To 
him, romance was bound up with the historical past, 



BRITAIN. 81 

commonly the past of his own country ; it was bound 
up with a very definite ideal of human nature. Both 
in its source and in its motive power it rested on 
action and on fact. It was the deeds of the moss- 
troopers, the clash and strain of Border warfare, that 
first stirred his imagination. And, though in his later 
and nobler work the horizon is markedly widened, it 
was still from the history of his own country, from a 
past well remembered and still lingering in well- 
known survivals of the present, that he drew his 
happiest inspirations. In the phantom world of Blake 
and Coleridge, in the vagrant inventions of Southey, 
he could never have been at home. 

The Scott of the " Scotch Novels " grew naturally 
from the Scott of the Border Minstrelsy. It is with 
the latter, however, that we are exclusively concerned 
— with the translations, collections, and original poems 
which fall between 1796 and 1814. 

The first ventures of Scott were in a strain rather 

curiously at variance with that which he was to make 

his own, but none the less significant. These 

Early work. . . . ° 

were the ringing versions ot Burger s two 
most famous ballads, Lenore and The Wild Huntsman 
(1796), appropriately contributed to the "hobgoblin 
repast" spread before the public in Lewis' Tales of 
Wonder. From such fantastic and gruesome subjects 
he was soon to turn away. But the choice of them 
for his earliest effort is proof, if proof were needed, of 
his irrepressible bent towards the world of romance ; 
while in the slightly mechanical devices, and the 
somewhat metallic ring, of the verse, we are perhaps 

F 



82 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

entitled to see his equally irrepressible bent toward 
the world of action and realities. There is certainly 
much more of the popular ballad in them, there is 
more of the tramp and crash of the moss-trooper, than 
there is in the originals of Burger. 

It was in 1799 that Scott fairly entered on his 
inheritance. In Glenfinlas and The Eve of Saint John, 

scott and his first original poems, he takes his theme 

Goethe. £ rom ftie legends of his own country, in 
the latter case from places familiar to him from 
childhood. And though the supernatural still plays 
a far larger part than in his maturer work, it is in 
a comparatively subdued key. The translation of 
Goethe's Gbtz in the same year marks a further step 
in advance. Here he first reveals the passionate 
interest in the actual past, the past of the middle 
ages, which was to inspire all that is most notable 
in his poetry, and no inconsiderable share of his 
prose romance. It was through Goethe, the father 
of medievalism in Germany, that he first came to 
a full sense of his own mission. But what in the 
one was no more than a passing phase, in the other 
was the passion of a lifetime. 

Not that there are not other differences too. For 
Goethe the middle ages presented a glowing contrast 
to all that fretted him in the life of his own day. 
And Gotz, in its own way, is hardly less of a satire on 
" this ink-slobbering century " than Die Rauber. Of 
this satiric intention there is no trace in Scott. That 
the ideals of the middle ages were not those of the 
eighteenth century, he knew as well as any man. 



BRITAIN. 83 

But it never occurred to him to put the two in 
competition, and in his picture of the past there 
is no touch of satire against the present. He is far 
too much in love with his inward vision to have 
leisure for comparing it with the realities at his 
gate. So it comes that he is far more whole-hearted 
than Goethe in his devotion to the past, and that his 
picture of it is far more complete. Partly from the 
necessities of the dramatic form, partly from natural 
inclination, Goethe fixed on one moment in the death- 
throes of mediaeval life — the struggle of individual 
freedom against the advancing tide of officialism and 
routine. Scott gives no such one-sided picture. He 
includes the whole web of feudal existence — its free- 
dom, its adventure, its romance, its chivalry, its super- 
stition — in his admiration, and finds room for them 
all in his poetry. And the air, if less charged with 
tragedy than in Goethe's play, is keener and more 
bracing. 

The first result of Scott's self-consecration to the 

middle ages was the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 

(1802), over which, with help from Leyden 

Minstrelsy. , \ , , , , , „ J 

and others, he had been busy for some 
years. This great collection consists of three parts, 
historical, romantic, and modern imitations, in the 
last of which Glenfinlas and other ballads by Scott 
himself are incorporated. It also contains disserta- 
tions of great value connected with Border history 
and the popular beliefs of the Scots. The Minstrelsy 
is avowedly modelled on Percy's Reliques. But a 
glance is enough to show how greatly the standard 



84 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of industry and accuracy necessary for such a task 
had risen in the interval. And the credit of this is 
largely due to Scott himself. 

Three years later began the long series of original 
romances : The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), 

Romances Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake 

inverse.. (1810), followed by others of which it is 
only necessary to mention The Lord of the Isles 
(1814). These were the rich harvest of his pre- 
liminary labours, the first free outpouring of the 
genius which, for the next five - and - twenty years, 
was to hold the world at his command. 

The poems have inevitably been, to some extent, 
overshadowed by the prose-romances. But, as one 
turns their pages, the old spell comes over one again. 
The swift action, the sense of free air and sunshine, 
the vivid if not altogether accurate pictures of nature, 
the thrill of danger, the stir of battle, the passion of 
courage and loyalty, the love of country and of coun- 
tryside, the recurring echo of the supernatural — all 
these things came from the inmost heart of Scott, and 
they still speak to the heart of the reader. In the 
subtler tones of romance he is doubtless lacking. He 
has not the magic touch, he has not the vivid colour, 
the command of mystery and of horror, which was the 
fairy-gift of Coleridge ; he has not the poignant sense 
of " beauty, beauty that must die," which was the 
birthright of Keats ; he has not the profound instinct 
of "old, unhappy, far-off things" which at moments 
visited Wordsworth. But these things are perhaps 
hardly compatible with the qualities which the three 



BRITAIN. 85 

earlier poems at any rate undoubtedly possess. And 
who shall say that these qualities are not worthy of 
admiration ? It is true that the workmanship of the 
poems is commonly rough, and that, in particular, the 
rhythm is for the most part wanting in delicacy — a 
defect which the obvious echoes of Christabel in the 
opening canto of the Lay only throw out into greater 
prominence. But it must be remembered that, in 
themes of this kind, anything of " finesse " would 
have been the most unpardonable of errors ; and that, 
if Scott erred, he erred at least on the right side. It 
must also be remembered that against the best of his 
lyrics and lyrical ballads — Lochinvar, for instance, or 
the Coronach or Proud Maisie, if an example may be 
taken from the novels — all such criticisms fall power- 
less to the ground. In the last of these especially the 
form is perfect, and, quite apart from the dramatic 
pathos, the lyric note rings out with a clearness which 
has seldom been surpassed. 

After the Lady of the Lake, the spring showed un- 
mistakable signs of running dry ; and the remaining 
waveriey poems, if not written to order, are too 
Novels. manifestly composed with an eye to the 
bills of Abbotsford. After the meteoric dawn of 
Byron (1813-14), Scott good - humouredly owned 
himself " beaten " ; but it was only to turn with 
unflagging zest to the fresh fields which he had 
discovered, almost by accident, in the latter year. 
Waveriey, laid aside in 1805, was taken up again 
and finished in the June of 1814. And when 
Ballantyne came to announce the comparative failure 



86 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of the Lord of the Isles, he found the author at 
white heat over the pages of Guy Mannering. 

The change of instrument and method was in every 
way for the good. In the cooler element of prose 
Scott sacrificed little or nothing — unless when he de- 
liberately chose to do so — of the rapidity of action 
which had been among the chief charms of his poetry. 
And he gained a field for his consummate powers 
of pathos, humour, and human sympathy, which he 
certainly never found, and in all probability never 
could have found, in his verse -romances. It was 
now that for the first time he drew from the soil of 
his own country, a soil formed by slow deposits 
reaching far back into the past, the rich savour 
which had hitherto lain there almost unsuspected; 
that, through local associations and the accidents of 
history, — associations and accidents which to him were 
inseparable from the deeper issues of imaginative 
creation, — he found his way to the enduring passions 
and the eternal instincts which are everywhere the 
same. Of all the results, ultimately traceable to 
the revival of popular poetry and national tradition 
associated with the names of Percy and Herder, 
this was the most original and the most precious. 
And here Scott was not only pioneer, but master 
without a rival. The work of Wordsworth, on one 
side of it, has obvious affinities with his ; but its 
origin was different, and it differs also in general 
effect. 

If the rarer qualities in Scott's genius were all his 
own, its more obvious features establish his kinship 



BRITAIN. 87 

with a whole host of writers both in this country 
Affinities and and on the Continent. His affinity with 
influence. Southey and with Coleridge has already 
been noted. He was himself the first to own, and 
chivalrously to exaggerate, his debt to Miss Edge- 
worth. He pointed the way for Byron. But, above 
all, he left a profound mark upon the character of the 
novel. Of the historical novel he was the creator ; 
though, in this country at any rate, he has not been 
altogether blessed in his successors. Those who 
have followed most closely in his steps have been 
manifestly unequal to the task ; and those who have 
best succeeded — Thackeray, for instance, and per- 
haps George Eliot — have departed the most widely 
from the methods of their model. A yet more 
important effect of his influence was to restore to 
the novel the element of romance. At the time 
when Waverley appeared, the tendency of the novel 
was to become a mere picture of contemporary 
manners. This was seen in Miss Austen ; it was 
seen a few years later in Gait. And, in the main, 
the strength of our novelists has always lain in this 
direction. It is perhaps thanks to Scott that the 
door has been kept open for more adventurous 
spirits. And, though the vein of unalloyed romance 
has been little worked, in two or three of our 
subsequent novelists, and those the greatest, it runs 
through the homelier metal of the groundwork, 
and transforms it. 

If we turn to the Continent, we still find Scott at 
our side. In Germany his influence is less apparent 



88 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

than elsewhere; chiefly because the romantic move- 
ment had there spent its force before he discovered 
the true secret of his powers. But it appears in 
Hauffs Lichtenstein, and it is strong on Wilibald 
Alexis, though he began by burlesquing the author 
whom in a few years he was to echo. With the 
romanticists of France and Italy on the other 
hand, the work of Scott bore incalculable fruit. 
It is enough to mention / Promessi Sposi in the one 
country, Notre Dame and the great romances of 
Dumas in the other. Even the Drama of both 
countries owes him a heavy debt. Carmagnola and 
Henri Trois, to say nothing of Cromivell and Le 
Roi s amuse, could hardly have been written as they 
were, had it not been for the historical romances of 
Scott ; and the same is true both of the dramas and 
the romances of Alexis Tolstoi in Eussia. 

To Moore (1779-1852) the descent is abrupt. Yet 

there was a time when he almost rivalled Scott and 

Byron in popularity. Nor is it altogether 

Moot c 

difficult to understand how this was. His 
facile talent, astonishing versatility, and ready wit 
were bound at any time to gain him a hearing ; while 
his overflowing sentiment exactly fell in with the 
mood of an age which loved the luxury of feeling, but 
had not learned to feel either strongly or with truth. 
Moreover, he had an unerring instinct — an instinct 
born of his keen sociability, and sharpened by it — 
for playing precisely the tune to which the public 
was sure to dance; and he owed his vogue largely 
to tastes which greater men, such as Byron, had 



BRITAIN. 89 

created. The worst defect of his poetry is its want 
of depth. But when his feelings were deeply stirred, 
as they were in the Irish Melodies and in one or 
two of the more personal lyrics, he displayed powers 
of which the rest of his work gives little suspicion. 

Apart from two youthful indiscretions, — Odes of 
Anacreon (1800) and Poems by the late Thomas Little 
(1801), — which are now hardly remembered except 
by the allusions in Byron's letters and English Bards, 
his first notable work was Epistles, Odes, and other 
Poems (1806) which, thanks to its strictures on the 
United States, gave occasion to his farcical duel with 
Jeffrey. This was followed in the next year by the 
first number of Irish Melodies (1807-1834). The best 
of these were inspired by the memory of Eobert 
Emmet, the noblest and purest of Irish patriots, with 
whom Moore had formed a devoted friendship in 
his college days. " When he who adores Thee " and 
" O, breathe not his Name," among others, are a 
monument to this affection, and to the love of 
country with which it was bound up. In these 
and The Minstrel Boy, and others besides, we have 
the perfection of patriotic poetry, strongly felt and 
spontaneously expressed. We have also a most 
melodious rhythm, such as was seldom lacking in 
Moore's verse, but which here takes a deeper note 
than usual. The same note makes itself heard, but 
more seldom, in the National Airs (1815), for in- 
stance in the Echo and "Oft in the stilly Night," 
which represent the high -water mark of the purely 
lyric, as distinct from the patriotic, inspiration of 



90 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the author. It would be hard to find a simpler or 
more graceful embodiment of feelings "which find 
an echo in every heart" than is offered by these 
poems. 

The only other serious work which calls for mention 
is Lalla Eoohh (1817), the "magnum opus" on which 
his fame as poet traditionally rests. 1 In glitter, and 
easy flow of melody, the poems which form the staple 
of this collection are incomparable. The eastern at- 
mosphere, at least in its grosser elements, is happily 
caught ; and, in the main, the stories are excellently 
told. But beyond this there is little to praise. The 
sentiment is superficial, and it is greatly overcharged. 
The suggestion of Byron's Tales is too palpable ; and 
the nobler qualities, which lift the Giaour and others 
above the level of the Bazaar and the Harem, are 
conspicuously absent. There is nothing of Byron's 
fire and passion ; nothing of the " unconquerable will " 
which makes itself felt even in the earlier and less 
memorable efforts of " the great Napoleon of the 
realms of rhyme." 

The lighter side of Moore's talent is less open to 
question. His easy style was exactly suited to the 
kind of satire at which he aimed ; and it is barbed 
by an unfailing flow of wit. The chief works under 
this head are The Twopenny Post-lag (1813) and the 
Fudge Family in Paris (1817). The former is a series 
of lively skits upon the Eegent and his intimates; 
the latter, like the Fables for the Holy Alliance (1823), 

1 The Loves of the Angels (1823) seems never to have been popular, 
and is now forgotten. 



BRITAIN. 91 

is full of equally lively banter on legitimacy and other 
fashionable absurdities. The Eegent does not seem to 
have taken the satire much to heart. But it probably 
did more to discredit him than most of the grosser 
denunciations of which he was the victim; and, in 
literary power, none of the heavier artillery can claim 
to have been a match for the Lilliputian darts of 
Moore. 

From the poets we turn to glance at the history of 
the Drama, the Novel, and the lighter forms of verse. 
Tragedy- In Tragedy, apart from those whose chief 
Miss Baiihc. wor k was done in other fields, there is but 
one name of any importance — Joanna Baillie (1762- 
1851). The fame of this lady, who had a great 
charm of character, stood very high with her con- 
temporaries, with none more so than Scott. But 
her dramas, verse and prose, tragedy and comedy, 
are now almost forgotten. Her earliest plays, Basil 
and De Montfort, — the latter has a heroine mani- 
festly drawn with an eye to the majestic presence 
of Mrs Siddons, — were apparently ranked highest by 
her admirers. But they are lacking in action, and 
are concerned too exclusively with the portraiture 
of certain moods, in both cases rather of a senti- 
mental cast, which the authoress had not the 
strength to make truly dramatic. Her style, too, 
though not without gleams of poetry, is commonly 
borrowed from the traditional frippery of the tragic 
wardrobe, and it is liable to sink into the merest 
bathos. Perhaps the chief importance of Miss Baillie 



92 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

is to have reflected, in a mild form, the romantic 
tendencies of the period; and that, not only in her 
sentiment, but in her choice of subject and surround- 
ings. She goes as far as the lower Empire and Ceylon 
for her plots; and when she returns home, it is to 
celebrate witchcraft. It is just to mention that in 
some of her lyrics — for instance, the Shepherd's Song 
— she strikes a far truer note than she was able to 
do in tragedy. 

The only other tragedies of mark are those written 
by Coleridge and Wordsworth during their apprentice- 
ship ; Osorio (written in 1797 ; recast, 
acted, and published as Remorse in 1812- 
13) and The Borderers (1795-96). Neither Osorio, 
at least in its original form, nor The Borderers 
could claim to be acting plays, though both were 
offered to the management of one or other of the 
London theatres. But both contain fine poetry; 
and both are, in a certain sense, dramatic. The 
former is conceived and written in the_ highest 
strain of romance, not without unmistakable echoes 
of Die Bduber. The scene is cast in Spain, at the 
height of the Moresco persecution ; it abounds in 
murders, real and supposed, in incantations, dreams, 
dungeons, and sepulchral caverns. But the merits of 
the play are independent of these rather naive ex- 
pedients. The passages printed in Lyrieal Ballads as 
" The Foster-Mother's Tale " and " The Dungeon " are 
romantic in the truest and best sense ; and there are 
touches of natural detail worthy of " This Lime-Tree 
Bower my Prison " and The Aneient Mariner. What 



BRITAIN. 93 

is more to the purpose, the figure of Osorio himself is 
finely conceived, though the execution must be ad- 
mitted often to fall short of the design. The coher- 
ence of the play was decidedly strengthened in the 
later version ; but this advantage was more than out- 
weighed by the excision of the poetical passages and 
the general loss of freshness. 

To the purposes of the stage The Borderers, as 
Wordsworth well knew, was even worse adapted than 
The Osorio; for it is almost wholly devoid of 

Borderers. ac ti on# Nor again has it the charm of 
language and imagery which belongs to the com- 
panion play of Coleridge. Its interest lies solely 
in the defiant malignity of Oswald, and in the 
mental struggles of the victim whom he holds in 
his grasp. Both characters were avowedly suggested 
by what Wordsworth himself had seen and inferred 
during his time in revolutionary France ; both, on 
the whole, are drawn with penetrating insight; 
and the latter, the self - appointed scourge of God, 
falls little, if at all, short of the demands of tragedy. 
The play has obvious affinities with Othello, which 
we know to have been " pre - eminently dear " to 
Wordsworth ; it has also, like Osorio, certain points 
in common with Die Rauber. But it would be rash 
to say that either of these was consciously before the 
mind of the poet when he wrote ; nor is the question 
of much moment. For The Borderers, both in its 
defects and its merits, is a work of striking origin- 
ality. It reflects, with even more fidelity than The 
Prelude, the working of the poet's mind at the chief 



94 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

crisis of its growth; and it is steeped through and 
through with the instincts and convictions which, 
mellowed by further thought and experience, were to 
colour the whole body of his subsequent poetry. 
Even in the history of the drama this play is not 
without significance. It is a marked instance of the 
tendency, which is to be traced so clearly in the best 
dramatic work of the last hundred years, and which, 
with all its dangers, is perhaps the best sign of 
promise for the future, — the tendency to lay stress 
not on outward action but on " the incidents in the 
development of a soul." In this sense The Borderers 
has some analogy with Don Carlos and Iphigenie ; 
it points the way to Luria and Colombe's Birthday. 
In comedy, during these thirty years, there are 
three names of note, and one of enduring distinction. 
These are Eichard Cumberland (1732- 

Comedy. 

1811), George Colman the younger (1762- 
1836), Holcroft (1745-1809), and Sheridan (1751- 
1816). The first of these maybe regarded as the chief 
representative of sentimental comedy ; while Sheridan 
and, in a less degree Colman, were its sworn foes. 
The best-known plays of Cumberland are The Brothers 
(1769), The West Indian (1771), The Jew, and The 
Wheel of Fortune. It is the two latter of these which 
have earned him the doubtful fame of sentimentalist ; 
and to The Jew, in particular, the mocking homage 
offered in Retaliation is entirely applicable. The 
West Indian and The Wheel of Fortune are much 
better plays. The plot of the former, though certainly 
improbable, is ingeniously constructed ; and the latter 



BRITAIN. 95 

contains an excellent character, Penruddock. It is, 
however, chiefly his connection with sentimental 
comedy, and the consequent antagonism of Goldsmith 
and Sheridan — he is credibly believed to have sat for 
the portrait of Sir Fretful Plagiary — which give him 
importance. Colman, who began with serious drama, 
wisely soon turned to comedy, his best plays being 
written between 1797 and 1805. His comic vein, if 
not deep, is genuine enough ; so is his pathos ; and, at 
his best, he unites the two in scenes and characters 
which are truly humorous. He does so in John Bull, 
and still more in The Poor Gentleman. The latter 
contains two figures which are clearly suggested by 
my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim; but they are 
drawn with a completely original touch, and woven 
into a plot which moves on from beginning to end 
with an unflagging gaiety. Of his purely comic 
characters, the best are Dr Pangloss in The Heir at 
Law, and Ollapod in The Poor Gentleman ; the latter 
being conceived and executed in a manner which 
owes something to Smollett and faintly anticipates 
Dickens. The third and last of these dramatists is 
Holcroft, now chiefly remembered as author of The 
Road to Ruin (1792), which, though slightly overdone 
in sentiment, is indisputably dramatic, as well as ex- 
cellently fitted for the stage; and it contains one 
character, Goldfinch, the horsey young spark, who is 
a truly comic creation. With Anna St Ives (1792) 
and other romances, Holcroft also enters into the 
history of the novel. And his autobiography, com- 
pleted by Hazlitt, is a book of surprising interest. 



96 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Beggar, pedlar, stable-boy, shoemaker, tutor, trans- 
lator, actor, playwright, novelist, politician — he led 
a life of extraordinary activity. Included in the ill- 
judged prosecutions for high treason of 1794, he was 
discharged, in entire default of evidence ; and, on this 
side, he is, as a man, the most interesting representa- 
tive of that phase of opinion which reappears, under 
very different forms, in Godwin and Bage. 

The dramatic activity of Sheridan was begun and 

ended within five years ; from 1780 onwards his fitful 

energies were thrown into politics. His 

Sheridan. 

fame rests solely upon three plays, all 
written before he was thirty : The Rivals (1775), 
The School for Scandal (1777), and The Critic 
(1779). But Byron, if the application of his re- 
mark may be slightly altered, and if one may sup- 
pose him to have spoken only of his own genera- 
tion, was clearly right in saying that each of these 
was "the best of its kind": the Rivals in that sort 
of comedy which borders upon farce ; the School 
in pure comedy; and the Critic in burlesque. Like 
Goldsmith's plays, all three bear strong marks of 
reaction against the false sentiment which, in Kelly, 
Cumberland, and others, threatened to swamp the 
English stage. And, as Goldsmith's plays do not, the 
School for Scandal, at any rate, goes back, though 
hardly to the extent alleged by Lamb, to the "arti- 
ficial comedy" of Congreve for its model. In the 
Rivals, it is true, the vapid episode of Julia and 
Falkland was thrust in, as a concession to the false 
taste of the time; but it is done with the worst 



BRITAIN. 97 

possible grace, and the whole strength of the author 
is thrown into the light comedy of the main plot 
and the sparkling characters which support it. It is 
nothing to say that Sir Anthony and Mrs Malaprop 
are a reminiscence of Humphrey Clinker. Their first 
suggestion may have been taken from that source ; 
but it is bettered in the taking. And if the latter 
cannot be said of Bob Acres, who has been accused of 
descent from Sir Andrew Aguecheek, he is man 
enough to do credit to his parentage. The School for 
Scandal is, doubtless, a more ambitious effort. The 
element of farce is gone ; the wit is yet more keenly 
polished; and the social satire is to the last degree 
elaborate. The whole machinery of the " school," in- 
deed, seems to have been an afterthought; it may 
even, when it first occurred to Sheridan, have been 
designed as the material for a separate play ; and, 
when all is said and done, it remains a question 
whether the "asps and amphisbaenas " of the satire 
are quite the right company for the airy creations of 
the comedy. But, if the combination was an error, it 
is one for which the brightness of the situations, the 
skill of the portraiture, and, above all, the brilliance 
of the dialogue, amply atone. There is not the 
buoyant fun of Goldsmith, nor even of the Rivals. 
There is no character so overflowing with comic 
humour as Tony Lumpkin or Croaker or Mr Lofty. 
But in brilliance of style the School for Scandal throws 
everything since Congreve into the shade. The Critic, 
in its first intention, was a satire on such tragedies 
as Cumberland's Battle of Hastings. But, as the 

Ct 



98 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

fashions of false tragedy are perennial, it has lost but 
little of its freshness by lapse of time. And, as a 
burlesque, it is at least equal to any of its precursors, 
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Rehearsal, or 
Tom Thumb the Great. With all respect for the 
brilliant and honourable part which he played in 
politics, it is impossible not to regret that this should 
have been the last of Sheridan's literary ventures. 

The Novel, it need hardly be said, fills a far larger 

space than the Drama in the history of the period. 

It follows two distinct lines of develop- 

The Novel. , * 

ment, — the one starting from the Castle of 
Otranto, the line of romance; the other, and at the 
moment the more important, carrying on the tradi- 
tion of Eichardson, but tending more and more to 
eliminate the romantic, and to retain only the more 
matter-of-fact, elements in the type fixed by Clarissa 
and Sir Charles Grandison. The chief names con- 
nected with the former are Beckford (1759-1844), 
Mrs Kadcliffe (1764-1823), and Godwin (1756-1836). 
In the latter all the honours are carried off by women : 
Miss Burney (1752-1840), Miss Austen (1775-1817), 
and Miss Edgeworth (1767-1849). Between these 
must be placed the novelists of sentiment, of whom 
the most notable is Mackenzie (1745-1831). And in 
a class by themselves we may set those who wrote 
mainly for purposes of edification : Hannah More 
(1745-1833), Mrs Inchbald (1753-1821), and Bage 
(1728-1801). 

Romance had entrenched itself securely in poetry 



BRITAIN. 99 

long before it made conquest of the novel. Not that 
Romance— invasion was not frequently attempted ; 
Beckford. ^^ f Yom i ac k of genius or other causes, 
in every case it was doomed to failure. The first 
of these ventures was made by Beckford, son of the 
famous alderman who bearded the king and was 
among the chief supporters of Chatham. Vathek, 
the young millionaire's one effort in serious fiction, 
was written in 1782, and written in French. The 
translation, made more or less with the author's co- 
operation, was first published, but without his sanc- 
tion, in 1786. The inspiration of this remarkable 
book is certainly French, rather than English. Its 
subject is clearly suggested by the eastern tales, 
so popular in France at the end of the seven- 
teenth and the beginning of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It owes something, though not much, to 
Marmontel; something perhaps to the Lettres Per- 
sanes ; and more, especially in its earlier pages, 
to the "philosophical" tales of Voltaire. In Eng- 
lish literature it was, therefore, an exotic, and that, 
rather than any lack of brilliance, must be held 
to account for its comparative failure. It seems to 
have passed almost unheeded by a generation more 
engrossed in admiring its own portrait than in the 
fantasies of the East ; and it was reserved for the 
age of Byron to acknowledge its merits. The 
imagination of the book is, in truth, extremely 
striking; and it is of a typically romantic cast. 
The oriental splendours of the Caliph's palace of 
pleasure are painted with the zest of one bora to 



100 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the purple ; the world of Djinns and Ghouls and 
enchanters, with the ardour of one who has almost 
persuaded himself to believe in them. And through 
it all, there are flashes of mockery hardly less sudden 
than Voltaire's ; the mockery of the sceptic who re- 
joices in turning his own creations into ridicule; 
the mockery of the voluptuary who knows in his 
heart that all is vanity. At the close, however, — 
and it is only then that he rises to his full power, — 
all mockery is thrown aside; and the doom of the 
Caliph, his punishment in the hall of Eblis, is told 
with a daemonic fury which has seldom been sur- 
passed. But it was not until a generation had gone 
by that any of these things found an echo. 

With Mrs Kadcliffe the case is almost the reverse. 

Her powers were far inferior to Beckford's ; but, such 

as they were, they secured fame for her at 

Mrs Badcliffe. * J 

once. Her chief works belong to the last 
decade of the century — The Sicilian Romance (1790), 
The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of 
Udolpho (1794), and The Italian (1797). Her name is 
now little better than a bye-word. But in her day she 
was probably the most popular of romance- writers ; 
and a generation later, Byron boldly mentioned her 
in the same breath with Shakespeare. And, extrava- 
gant as such an estimate is, she was not only a 
marked figure in her own time, but, as pioneer, she 
played an important part in the history of the 
romantic novel. This is true in at least three partic- 
ulars. She was the first to make sensational incident 
the staple of the story, and thus, in spite of her 



BRITAIN. 101 

cloying sentiment, she may fairly be regarded as founder 
of the sensation novel. She was the first, if we 
except leaders without followers such as Beckford, 
to employ supernatural, or at the least mysterious, 
machinery. And she was the first, the above limita- 
tion being again understood, to group her incidents 
round distinctively romantic characters; the first, in 
particular, to recognise the full virtue of the 
picturesque, the mysterious, villain. To these, as a 
point of less but still of considerable importance, it 
may be added that she was the first, in this country, 
to make the set description of nature a standing 
garnish of the novelist's banquet. None of these 
inventions, however, is worked in other than a most 
bungling fashion. Her descriptions are monotonous; 
her sensation is too often a blind passage leading to 
nothing; her villains, with the possible exception of 
Schedoni in her last novel, are uncommonly poor 
creatures; and her supernatural machinery — it was 
not for nothing that she was a child of the age of 
reason — is explained away with provoking regularity. 
Moreover, her local colouring is glaringly at fault. 
She may cast her scene in Italy or France, in the 
sixteenth century or the seventeenth. It makes not 
.the slightest difference. Whatever the period, what- 
ever the country, it is the sentiment, it is the social 
manners of England under George III., that she puts 
before us. On the whole, she may be said to have 
rather modelled the scattered limbs of the romantic 
novel — and that very imperfectly — than to have 
created it as an organic whole. Even this, however, 



102 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

was a considerable achievement. And though her 
influence on individual writers of a later date may 
have been exaggerated — she has been too unreservedly 
credited with the parentage of Byron and of Charlotte 
Bronte — yet there is no doubt that, as romantic and 
sensational novelist, she was feeling after a notable 
ideal; an ideal which it required greater genius 
than hers to attain. 

Mackenzie stands somewhat apart among the 
novelists of the time; and he does so, because 
he combines tendencies which hitherto 
had existed in separation. His first and 
best known work, The Man of Feeling (1771), is 
one of the few attempts to carry on the tradition 
of Sterne. But the attempt is crude, and it may 
be doubted whether Sterne himself would have 
recognised the succession. The Man of the World 
(1775) has a dash of Eousseau, — the Eousseau not 
of Heloise, but of the humanitarian propaganda. 
In Julia de BoubignS (1777), a far more power- 
ful novel than either of the foregoing, the star 
of Heloise is in the ascendant. But, as emphatic- 
ally is not the case in Kousseau's romance, jealousy 
is the main theme of the story; and it is handled 
with a tragic ruthlessness which recalls the manner 
of Calderon rather than of any more northern 
writer. Certainly, Julia has far more of the legiti- 
mate romance than either of the earlier stories ; and, 
Clarissa apart, it may fairly claim to be the earliest 
tragic novel in the language. Yet, with curious per- 
versity, it is by his earlier efforts, it is as high-priest 



BKITAIN. 103 

of sensibility, that the world has decided to remember 
Mackenzie. 

Equally hard to class are the novels of Godwin. 

His first and most famous attempt in this kind, Caleb 

Williams (1794), has certain elements of 

Godwin. 

romance; but its primary purpose is to 
expose the abuses of society ; and its chief interest 
lies in its command of morbid psychology. It is 
with his next story, St Leon (1799), that he definitely 
enters the lists of romance, the romance of the im- 
possible ; and St Leon, fittingly enough, is the parent 
of Frankenstein. The hero of the story is entrusted, 
under the seal of silence, with the secret of the 
philosophers' stone and the " elixir vitse " ; and the 
drift of the resulting romance is to show the misery 
which such powers would entail, "cutting off the 
possessor from the dearest ties of human existence 
and rendering him a solitary, cold, self-centred " — and 
it might have been added, powerless — "individual." 
These consequences are grasped and presented with 
marvellous vividness, and with not more than the due 
mixture of oblique satire upon the perversity of human 
nature and the iniquities of superstition. But it must 
be confessed that Godwin shares with Mrs Eadcliffe 
the incapacity to seize the local and historical atmo- 
sphere of the scenes which he sets himself to describe ; 
and that the sentimental opening of the story, which 
fills one volume out of four, is detestable. Yet, in 
spite of these defects, St Leon is both a notable book 
in itself and forms a notable landmark in the rough 
beginnings of the romantic novel, though it is hard to 



104 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

keep one's countenance over the ingenuous patronage 
with which, in the advertisement of 1831, he speaks 
of the subsequent " discoveries " of Scott in this de- 
partment. Caleb Williams has no more than a slight 
flavour of romance ; but it gives a far higher impres- 
sion of Godwin's imaginative powers. Its first inten- 
tion, as has been said, is to reinforce the indictment 
against society which had been launched by Political 
Justice in the previous year, to show that there is one 
law for the rich and another for the poor. But out of 
this unmalleable material the arch-anarchist has con- 
trived to fashion what is, in many respects, a dramatic 
masterpiece. The blind curiosity, which drives Caleb 
to unravel his master's secret, the subtle interchange 
of baser and nobler passion in the character of Falk- 
land, the alternation of fascination and repulsion that 
each exercises upon the other, — this is the central 
theme of the story ; and, if we make due allowance 
for Godwin's inveterate habit of preaching, it is treated 
with masterly penetration. As a study of morbid 
pathology it has few rivals in the language. And it 
is by this book, if any, that Godwin, as an imaginative 
writer, still survives. 

We turn now from the romantic novel to that of 

contemporary life. It is by her two first novels, 

Novdof Evelina (1778) and Cecilia (1782), that 

nwMners- ' Miss Burney takes rank. In Camilla 

MissBumcy. (17gg) ^ ^ WandeTer (1814) her hand 

had lost its cunning ; and were it not for the Diary, 
which retains the old brilliance almost to the last, one 
might have been half tempted to regard her early 



BRITAIN. 105 

triumphs as a happy accident. The influence of 
Eichardson on her two masterpieces is manifest at a 
glance ; on Cecilia, which is written in narrative, still 
more than in Evelina, which retains the letter-form of 
Clarissa. The sentiment, the woes of the oppressed 
damsel, the hair-splitting on minute points of honour, 
all bear witness to the first source of Miss Burney's 
inspiration. And yet, with all her talent for these 
solemnities, it is easy to see that her heart was never 
in them as Eichardson's had been. What really 
fascinates her is the strange medley of characters that 
she meets by the way. Boorish sea-captains, chattering 
Frenchwomen, irrepressible coxcombs, maniac misers, 
headlong gamblers, flunkey tradesmen, pompous aristo- 
crats — "the small vulgar and the great" — all these crowd 
her canvas ; all are painted in the most vivid colours 
and with the most lifelike effect. Caricatures they may 
be, but it is the caricature of genius ; of a genius which, 
in two or three scenes at any rate, might well have 
stirred the envy of Dickens. " My little character- 
monger " Johnson used to call her ; and this was to 
lay his finger upon the secret of her power. There 
had been nothing quite like it in the previous history 
of the novel. Smollett had come nearer to it than 
any other writer ; but the figures of Smollett, with all 
their amazing distinctness, have too much the air of 
curiosities in a museum. Miss Burney's live and 
move and gesticulate before us. And this points to 
what, at bottom, she had in common with Eichardson, 
the power of throwing herself, body and soul, into the 
world of her imagination ; the love of story- telling, 



106 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

"die Lust zu fabulieren," for its own sake. It is 
something altogether apart from the eye for absurdities 
and eccentricities, which is the first thing to strike the 
reader in her genius ; and, without it, her " humours " 
— to adopt Macaulay's analogy from Jonson — would 
have been very different from what they are. Give 
her a commonplace incident, an almost trivial ex- 
perience, and, with her fabling instinct, she will at 
once turn it into a novel in brief. It is this which 
makes the undying charm of the Diary, a Diary 
rivalled only by that of Pepys. Her life with the 
equerries and the Schwellenberg, deadly dull as it 
must have been in the suffering, is as good as a play 
in the telling. A race with the tide, such as might 
have befallen any other old lady, becomes under her 
pen the most thrilling of romances. Her picture of 
Johnson and his circle is as vivid as BoswelTs; her 
account of the hopes and fears that gathered round 
the madness of the king is worthy of Saint- Simon or 
Carlyle. And this quality, no less than the genius for 
creating humours, is as strong in her novels ; at least, 
in the first and best of them, Evelina. 

Miss Austen found a field entirely her own ; but, 

none the less, she is in the direct descent from Miss 

Burney ; and the very theme of her first 

Miss Austen. . , 

novel, Pride and Prejudice, — a master- 
piece, if there ever was one, — is manifestly suggested 
by the closing chapter, and, indeed, by the whole 
tenour, of Cecilia. None of her books was published 
until 1811 ; but the three first were written before 
the end of the century — Pride and Prejudice in 



BRITAIN. 107 

1796 - 97 (published 1813) ; Sense and Sensibility in 
1797-98 (published 1811); Northanger Alley in 1798 
(published 1817). Then followed a long break, at 
the end of which came Mansfield Park (1814), Emma 
(1816), and Persuasion (1817). 

In treatment, as well as in subject, Pride and 
Prejudice stands much nearer to Miss Burney than 
any of the later novels. Some of the characters, 
though doubtless more delicately drawn than the 
corresponding figures in Evelina or Cecilia^ have an 
undeniable touch of caricature, and that is more than 
could be said of anything in Mansfield Park or Emma. 
The vein of satire, it is true, always remained. Once, 
in Northanger Alley, it took the form of good- 
humoured burlesque on the romantic machinery of 
Mrs Eadcliffe ; more commonly it appears only in the 
keen sense of human foibles, in the penetrating but 
subdued humour, which is the seal of all that is most 
characteristic in her work, and which is written at 
least as legibly upon her features. To such a temper 
romance of any kind, whether of circumstance or 
sentiment, could hardly fail to be distasteful. And, 
except as an object of more or less pronounced satire, 
it is rigidly excluded from Miss Austen's novels. It 
is all sense, and no sensibility, with her; until, by 
a turn highly characteristic of her well - balanced 
humour, she suddenly bethinks herself, in Emma, to 
demolish the golden image of all the practical virtues 
which she had set up in her previous heroines. Yet, 
even here, there is no attempt to exalt the more 
romantic qualities ; the weak side of the managing 



108 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

temperament is shown, and that is all. From all this 
it is clear that the range of her novels is strictly 
limited, and it is so of set purpose. It is among the 
highest marks of her genius that she knew precisely 
where her powers lay, and that nothing, not even the 
hint of a Begent's wishes, would induce her to move 
one step from the path which they manifestly pointed 
out The province that she took for herself was the 
uneventful life of the country house and the country 
parsonage, with the unad venturous temper and the 
not too heartrending passions which naturally find 
a home there. On this sober background each of her 
figures stands out marvellously distinct, each delicately 
but decisively shaded off from all the rest. Thus by 
limiting her range, she secured absolute control over 
every inch of the ground. By measuring her resources, 
she achieved complete unity of effect, together with a 
mastery of her instrument, such as few artists can 
claim to have approached. In these respects, it is 
hardly too much to say that, by her, most of our 
novelists appear little better than bunglers. The limits 
she set herself may be, they undoubtedly are, com- 
paratively narrow. But within those limits, the genius 
she shows is unerring, and the art is perfect. Her 
minute portraiture of still life in country and country- 
town has supplied an ideal to a host of subsequent 
novelists. But it is an ideal which Mrs Gaskell alone, 
in Cranford and Wives and Daughters, has been able 
to attain. George Eliot might be cited as a further 
instance. But there is so much beside this in her 
novels, that the general effect is altogether different. 



BRITAIN. 109 

Talented as she is, Miss Edgeworth is far from 

reaching the same level as either of the foregoing, 

though in variety she certainly sur- 

Miss Edgeworth. •»«•• i i -»«-• 

passes Miss Austen, and perhaps Miss 
Burney also. There are, in fact, three distinct veins 
which she worked with unquestioned success : that 
of edification, in the Moral and Popular Tales; 
romance, as in Ormond ; and the vivid portraiture 
of Irish life, of which Ormond (1817) is one ex- 
ample, and Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee 
(1812) are, rather strangely, instances more familiar. 
The Moral and Popular Tales are wonderful achieve- 
ments in a field which was diligently tilled during 
this period, and where a harvest is singularly hard to 
reap. In the more ambitious ones, doubtless, — in the 
Eosamond and Laura of our youth, — the claims of the 
humdrum virtues are driven home with too little of 
remorse ; and the child-reader begins to hate the very 
sound of prudence, thrift, and foresight, to think 
much less of the wise virgin than the foolish. But in 
the shorter tales — Simple Susan, for instance, or Lazy 
Lawrence — the moral agriculture is less obtrusive, and 
the stories are told with unfailing zest and much 
dramatic power. In romance — or, more accurately, in 
the tales of " fashionable " life and sentiment — she is 
less at home, and her work less distinctive ; though, 
even here, she is by no means to be despised. 
Belinda, for instance (1801), has curious anticipations 
of some of the most recent developments of the novel. 
It is, however, by her pictures of Irish life — the light- 
hearted peasant and the rollicking squireen, whom 



110 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

she had known from childhood — that her fame is kept 
alive. Here her work is admirable in itself — King 
Corny, for instance, in Ormond is a masterpiece ; and 
it is yet more important, as the first thing of the kind 
in the history of the novel. Before Miss Edgeworth, 
no novelist had taken the humours of the soil for the 
main theme — nor even, if we consider the matter 
strictly, as a subordinate theme — of his story. The 
nearest approach to anything of the kind is to be found 
in the " picaresque " romances, of which Gil Bias and 
Tom Jones are the standing examples. But there, 
adventure is the real object; and, so long as plenty of 
that be provided, the peasant's hut counts for less than 
the band of strolling players, or the den of thieves, or 
the old man of the hill. With Miss Edgeworth, the 
conditions are exactly reversed. Adventure falls into 
the background. The whole interest gathers round 
the peat-bog, the peasant's hovel, the ramshackle castle 
of the village " king." That she gained a hearing for 
things so " low," as fifty years earlier Fielding's readers 
had reckoned them to be, is, no doubt, partly due to 
her own talent. But it is due still more to a change 
in the reading public, a change ultimately bound up 
with the French Eevolution and the influence of 
Eousseau. It is due most of all to the picturesque 
charm of the particular soil on which it was her 
fortune to be born. Had she painted the peasants of 
Devon or Yorkshire, it is more than doubtful whether 
her portraits would have been hung. However that 
may be, her " Irishry " prepared the way for the lairds, 
peasants, gaberlunzies, and gipsies of Scott ; just as, at 
a later time, they gave the hint for the moujiks of Tur- 



BRITAIN. Ill 

genjev and Tolstoi. And by two of these the instruc- 
tion, though by Scott at any rate it was immeasurably 
bettered, is admitted to have come, in the first in- 
stance, from the authoress of Ormond. 

Few words will suffice for the novel of edification, 
a species which, like the romantic novel, first took 
distinct shape during this period. The 
chief difficulty in dealing with it comes 
from the faintness of the line which separates it 
from more legitimate forms of the novel, particularly 
from the novel of sentiment. Thus, by some qualities 
of his work, Mackenzie might w T ell be reckoned 
among the prophets of the pulpit. So also might 
Miss Edgeworth. On the other hand, Mrs Inchbald's 
right to a place in the catalogue might not un- 
reasonably be disputed. The first of her two novels, 
A Simple Story, manifestly as it is planned to show 
a the pernicious effects of an improper education," 
is still of intrinsic interest from the vividness 
of its characters. It is only by her later venture, 
Nature and Art, that she definitely — and, it must be 
added, with brilliant effect — crosses the border into 
the romance of edification. The same doubt arises 
with Bage. In such cases as Hannah More, however, 
there is no possibility of question. She is a preacher 
of pure blood. So is Day, the author of Sandford 
and Merton. 

During her long and active life, Hannah More 

won fame in many directions. Drama, sacred and 

profane, social and sentimental poetry, 

Mrs More. r . , 

political and religious tracts, had all 
brought her distinction, — the two former a full 



112 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

generation before she tried her fortune with the 
novel. It is, however, her one novel, Coelebs in 
search of a Wife (1809), which alone survives to 
the present day. And, from beginning to end, it is 
avowedly the work of a moralist : a moralist who had 
been honoured with the affection of Johnson, and 
carried on his tradition. The characters of the story, 
it must be confessed, are little more than the mouth- 
piece of the author's religious and social opinions, or 
beacons of warning against those who rejected them. 
But the opinions themselves, which are those of 
moderate evangelicalism, are sound and healthy ; and 
the book is interspersed with lively as well as sensible 
satire upon the social and educational follies of the 
time. In spite of the continual sermons, the story 
has undeniable interest ; and the style, obviously 
flavoured with reminiscences of Johnson, is as sound 
as the matter. That the authoress had Rasselas more 
or less present to her mind, is not impossible. But it 
is Rasselas without the romantic setting, and without 
the plangent note of melancholy which gives it pathos 
and distinction. The finest work of Mrs More lay in 
her self-denying labours for the miners and peasantry 
of Somerset; and her Memoirs, embodying excellent 
letters by herself and her sisters, will long serve to 
keep her strong and kindly character in remembrance. 
Mrs Inchbald was one of the most quick-witted 
as well as one of the most attractive women of her 

Mrs inehtoid. day ; and ' thou g h writing seems to have 

been against the grain with her, she left 

her mark both on the theatre and the novel. She 



BRITAIN. 113 

produced a variety of lively farces and other dramatic 
pieces, besides a valuable collection of stock plays, 
The British Theatre. And her two novels, A Simple 
Story (1791) and Nature and Art (1796), are both 
works of marked individuality. The character of 
the heroine in the former is drawn with singular 
dramatic skill; though, with a view to pointing the 
moral, the frivolity of a not ill -meaning coquette 
is handled far too vindictively by the authoress. 
Nature and Art is a still more distinctive tale ; 
and, as has been said, the didactic purpose is still 
more clearly marked. A lad, who has been bred 
among savages, is suddenly pitchforked into an 
intensely respectable circle of deans, bishops, and 
predestined judges. The thread of the story is 
spun round the contrast between his " nature " 
and the artificiality of his surroundings. The situ- 
ations are both conceived and worked out with 
charming vivacity ; and the amount of direct preach- 
ing is surprisingly small. It has a further interest 
from the sources of its inspiration. If Mrs More 
represents the tradition of Johnson, Mrs Inchbald 
stands for that of Voltaire and Eousseau. There is a 
touch of L'Ingtnu in Nature and Art, there is more 
than a touch of the Discours sur la Civilisation and 
of Emile. 

A word may be said of a novel which appeared 

in the same year as Nature and Art, and which has 

some points in common with it ; Herm- 

sprong or Man as he is not, by Bage. It 

has the misfortune to be one of the worst - told 

H 



114 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tales in the language. Yet it is full of talent, 
and represents, better perhaps than any other work 
of fiction, the ferment of opinion which the French 
Eevolution raised in this country during the last 
ten years of the eighteenth century. It abounds 
in effective satire against the established order, 
both in Church and State. Like Nature and Art, 
it is strongly influenced by Eousseau and, to a less 
degree, by Voltaire. It anticipates — though it must 
be confessed, feebly enough — the backwoods and 
Eed Indians of Chateaubriand. And in the style, 
there is here and there a dash of Sterne. In this 
strange medley, the most effective figure is that of 
Miss Fluart, the strong-minded and resourceful coun- 
sellor of an intolerably insipid heroine. But the 
chief significance of the book is to be an early sample 
of the "novel with a purpose"; and a record of an 
important, but now nearly forgotten, phase of public 
opinion, the phase that is also represented by Godwin 
and by Holcroft. 

This completes our account of the novel. It 
only remains to define the chief changes which the 
Development history of these years brought about in 
of the mvd. ita genera i character and scope. To begin 
with the point of least importance, it was during 
this period that the novel was first used for the 
distinct purpose of preaching social reform. This, 
no doubt, was a dangerous principle to bring into 
a work of imagination; and those who imported it 
had not, any more than the majority of their suc- 
cessors, the genius which alone can turn it to good 



BRITAIN. 115 

account. But it is only just to remember that the 
novel with a purpose has not always been the 
clumsy thing it was in the hands of its inventors; 
and that in rare cases — cases, however, which include 
many of the novels of Dickens and one at least of 
the romances of Hugo — it has supplied the frame- 
work for some of the greatest triumphs achieved in 
fiction. Turning to the main stream of development, 
we find that the various currents, which hitherto had 
hardly separated themselves, tend more and more to 
become distinct. Eomance breaks away from the 
tale of contemporary manners ; the tale of contem- 
porary manners purges itself more and more from 
the leaven of sentiment and romance. The latter 
process is seen in the passage from Richardson to 
Miss Burney, and from Miss Burney to Miss Austen. 
It was soon to be carried still further by Gait. The 
former process, in view of its ultimate consequences, 
is perhaps still more important. For it was during 
these years that the way was gradually prepared for 
the romantic novel, as perfected by Scott. The task 
of elaborating this form of the novel was more than 
ordinarily slow. The first elements to take definite 
shape are those which were drawn from the work 
of the great novelists of the preceding generation; 
the element of sentiment, as embodied in the Man of 
Feeling ; that of highly wrought passion, in Julia de 
Roubignt. Then, with Vathek, comes the romance 
of the supernatural, which is brought a step nearer 
to the ordinary conditions of life in St Leon. Finally, 
all these elements meet — meet, but without combining 



116 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

— in the novels of Mrs Kadcliffe ; who also attempts 
— it is true, with the least possible success — to add 
to them the interest which springs from an appeal to 
the historic past. Before the end of the century, 
moreover, Miss Edgeworth, a romanticist without 
knowing it, had lit upon yet another theme, which 
was ultimately to find place within the magic circle 
of the romantic novel — that of a richly-coloured local 
life, which has come down almost unchanged from 
remote antiquity. Thus, within these thirty years, 
all the materials which went to the making of the 
Waverleys had been gradually accumulated. Only 
the touch of the " magician " was needed to harmonise 
them, and make each of them fall into its proper 
place. 

In the lighter poetry of the time, which practically 
reduces itself to political and, in a less degree, to 
Lighter poetry literai 7 satire, the chief names are Wolcot 
-woicot, (Peter Pindar), Gifford, the authors of the 
Rolliad and those of the Anti- Jacobin. 
At first the wit was with the Opposition; it was 
only at the reaction against the French Eevolution 
that it came round to the side of the Ministry. 
Wolcot (1738-1819), who may be defined as a more 
versatile and more abusive Churchill, began as as- 
sailant of the Eoyal Academy (1782-85), and then 
of Boswell and Mrs Thrale. But he soon flew at 
higher game, the royal household and the king. 
His most elaborate effort in that kind is the Lousiad 
(1786), a lively but intolerably coarse mock-heroic 



BRITAIN. 1 1 7 

on the alleged discovery of a louse in the royal 
peas. This was followed, during the next twenty 
years and more, by a succession of bitter squibs 
against Pitt, his henchmen and his master ; together 
with somewhat two-edged apologies for Paine and 
other " incendiaries." His eye for a good subject is 
uncommonly keen ; his command of language, and 
particularly of effective rhyme, almost inexhaustible. 
But, especially in his earlier writings, the undoubted 
merits of his satire are weakened, even for the purpose 
of momentary effect, by his unbridled scurrility. The 
work done by Gifford (1756-1826) on his own account 
is small in quantity, and by no means first-rate in 
quality. The Baviad (1794), the Mceviad (1795), and 
an Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) almost exhaust the 
list. The two former pieces are a violent attack upon 
the tenth - rate poets of the day, particularly the 
" Delia Cruscans " (Merry, Greathead, Mrs Eobinson, 
Mrs Thrale, and the rest) who flourished during the 
ten years following 1785. But there is little literary 
power in the new Dunciad, which has all the defects 
of the old and none of its amazing merits. The most 
significant thing in the two diatribes is the admiring 
tribute to Pope; and by far the most amusing, the 
copious samples of these languishing rhymesters em- 
balmed in the notes. The Epistle to Peter Pindar is 
without even these attractions ; the writer contrives 
to surpass his very correspondent in scurrility, and 
one cannot regret that he was paid in kind by A 
Cut at a Cobbler. As editor of the Quarterly (1809- 
1825), Gifford has been commonly credited with the 



118 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

notorious critique on Endymion ; certainly, under 
his editorship, there was too much of that species 
of writing. His other works are translations of 
Juvenal and Persius ; and editions, where he is seen 
at his best, of Massinger and Jonson. He was en- 
gaged on an edition of Shirley when he died. 

The Eolliad — or rather, Criticisms on the Eolliad 
(1784-85) — is a lively collection of satires directed 
against Pitt at the beginning of his long 
ministry. The eponymous hero of it is 
Eolle, a blundering supporter of the Ministry, who 
in an evil moment had claimed descent from Eollo 
of Normandy. The " Eolliad " is an imaginary poem, 
supposed to have been written by this person ; and the 
" criticism " consists of a running commentary on the 
shadowy original, with copious extracts, maliciously 
burlesquing Pitt, Dundas, Jenkinson, and other "souls 
congenial to the souls of Eolles." It was immediately 
followed by Political Eclogues, Political Miscellanies, 
and Probationary Odes; the last, a literary burlesque 
aimed at Wraxall, the Wartons, Ossian Macpherson, 
and others, in a style which anticipates Rejected 
Addresses. The authorship of these pieces has never 
been certainly assigned; but among those who con- 
tributed were Fitzpatrick, the friend of Fox, Laurence, 
the friend of Burke, General Burgoyne (of Saratoga), 
and George Ellis, subsequently the friend of Pitt, 
Canning, and Scott. The literary merit of all four 
collections is very considerable; the satire on Pitt 
is excellent; so is that on Shelburne, Wraxall, and 
Macpherson. 



BRITAIN. 119 

Still more brilliant is the poetry of the Anti- 
Jacobin (1797-98). Of this famous periodical the 
chief authors were Canning (1770-1827), 

Anti- Jacobin. & v J 

Ellis (1753-1815), and Frere (1769-1846); 
Gifford acted as editor. It began to appear im- 
mediately after Pitt's second and last attempt at 
negotiation with the " regicide Directory " ; and from 
beginning to end it breathes contempt for the Kevolu- 
tion and all its works. The strictly political part 
is good enough, — La sainte Guillotine, for instance, 
or The New Morality, or the Elegy on the Death of 
Jean Bon St Andri. But the literary satire, the 
assault on poets infected or supposed to be infected 
with revolutionary principles, is still better. The 
Loves of the Triangles, The Progress of Man (in forty 
cantos), the Needy Knifegrinder, the Lnscription for 
Mrs Brownrigg's Cell, The Rover s, the hymn sung to 
the " mystic harps " of the 

" five other wandering bards that move 
In sweet accord of harmony and love, 
Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co." — 

these, in their kind, have never been surpassed; in 
all probability, they have never been equalled. In 
later years — Ellis, indeed, even earlier — all three 
satirists won renown in one field or another : Canning, 
besides his achievements in statesmanship and oratory, 
as author of sparkling squibs on Addington and of 
"The Pilot who weathered the Storm," the finest 
tribute, if we except Scott's on the same subject, 
which was ever offered to the genius of a great 



120 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

statesman ; Ellis in the revival of mediaeval scholar- 
ship ; Frere, as translator of Aristophanes and, still 
more, as author of The Monks and the G-iants (1817- 
18), a poem inspired by Pulci, Berni, and, in general, 
the mock-heroic of the Italians; and destined itself 
to be the inspiration of Beppo and Don Juan. 

Among the thinkers of the time, the figure of 
Burke (1729-1797) stands unapproached. In his in- 
tellectual temper it is easy to distinguish 

Burke. * J . . ° , 

two separate strains : one positive and 
scientific, the other speculative and even mystical. 
By these he was inevitably at times drawn in con- 
trary directions ; but whatever is best and most 
characteristic in his writings springs from the in- 
teraction of the two. In the earlier part of his 
career it may be said that the former is predomin- 
ant; the latter comes more and more to the surface 
in his closing years. Accordingly his work falls' 
naturally into two unequal periods; the first (1756- 
1789), in which he was mainly concerned with the 
political problems of his own country; the second 
(1790-1797), in which his soul was thrown into 
denouncing the Bevolutlon in France. 

I. (1756-1789.) Apart from the essay On the Sub- 
lime and Beautiful, which has been treated in the pre- 
r ceding volume, the writings and speeches 

■Her work. . ° r 

of this period form three groups, which 
divide themselves according to their subject. The 
first is concerned with matters of home politics : 
Observations on a late state of the Nation, an answer 



BRITAIN. 121 

to a Grenvillite pamphlet of a like title (1769) ; 
Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents 
(1770); and the speech On Economical Reform (1780). 
To these, from affinity of subject, may be added 
Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, which belongs to 
1793. The next group is devoted mainly to colonial 
policy : the speeches on American Taoiation (1774) 
and Conciliation with America (1775), and the Letter 
to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777). Finally, there are 
the Indian speeches: on Fox's East India Bill (1783), 
TJie Nabob of Arcofs Debts (1785), and the impeach- 
ment of Warren Hastings (1788-1795). 

In all these we have work which makes an epoch 
in the history of political discussion. Never before 
Appeal to had such industry been brought to the 
experience. serv i ce f these subjects ; never had they 
been treated so exhaustively or with such luminous 
insight. In the power of mastering the intricacies 
of a political problem, Burke had no forerunner ; with 
the exception of Gladstone, and possibly of Pitt, he 
has, in our country at least, had no successor. This 
was the positive strain in his genius ; and it led him 
to sift every question that came before him down 
to its minutest detail. Having gained his material 
in this way, he proceeded to order it in the light 
of the principles established by past experience ; 
always, that is, with what may be called a con- 
servative bias ; always with the object of applying 
what experience had shown to be expedient in the 
past, to determine what was likely to prove ex- 
pedient in the difficulties of the present. And his 



122 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

practical instinct, at any rate in the wider concerns 
of government, was so sure that, whenever he fairly 
set his mind to a question, he may commonly be 
reckoned to have said the last word upon its merits. 
There are, of course, exceptions; but, in his earlier 
years at any rate, this is the rule. Had his advice 
been taken on the matters at issue between the 
"patriot king" and his aggrieved subjects, or be- 
tween the mother country and her American colonies, 
two of the least agreeable chapters in British history 
would have remained unwritten. 

It is, however, not so much by his practical con- 
clusions as by his methods, and by the principles 
which lie behind those methods, that he 
must be judged. And here, as has been 
said, expediency was his guide : expediency, as indi- 
cated in the first instance by the experience of the 
past; expediency, as further interpreted by the specific 
circumstances of the present. Each of these two 
elements is essential to Burke's idea of expediency ; 
and, when he is true to himself, it would be hard to 
say which of them has the greater weight. The one 
carries with it the principle of conservation, the " dis- 
position to preserve," the other the principle of adap- 
tation, the readiness "to improve," of which he 
speaks in a well-known passage of his later writings. 
Both alike imply an anxious study of the actual 
conditions of the given problem; both alike demand 
a patient use of the historical method. It is this that 
marks him off from the common herd of publicists 
and statesmen. It is this that establishes a link 



BRITAIN. 123 

between him and the scientific tendencies of his 
time. Little as he would in some cases have liked 
the connection, he has this much in common with 
Priestley or the pioneers of natural evolution on the 
one hand; with economists like Adam Smith, or 
historians like Gibbon, on the other. His own field, 
doubtless, came to be more and more rigidly that 
of politics. But his central principle admitted, and 
eventually received, a far wider application, — an ap- 
plication to history, to economics, to natural science, 
and even to the study of literature. For all of 
these, each in its own way, it is as true as it is 
for politics that "circumstances, which with some 
gentlemen pass for nothing, give in reality to every 
principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating 
effect." And it is on an ever-deepening conviction 
of this truth that the thought and science of the 
last century are essentially built. 

In judging Burke's doctrine of expediency, it is 
necessary to remember how wide a scope — w r ider, 
it may be, than is altogether to be justi- 
fied — he persistently gives to the term. 
The expediency which the statesman has to consider 
is, to him, not the convenience of the moment, but 
that which is demanded for the permanent wellbeing 
of his nation. It includes not merely the material 
N prosperity or the territorial aggrandisement of his 
country, but the moral and spiritual responsibilities 
of its inhabitants. It embraces not merely what a 
selfish calculation "tells him that he may do," but 
what "humanity, reason, and justice tell him he ought 



124 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

to do." In other words, under the idea of expediency 
is comprised the idea of duty. Between the two 
regions, thus somewhat strangely grouped under a 
common denomination, Burke does not attempt to 
lay down theoretical demarcations. And it is char- 
acteristic of him that he does not. Each case that 
occurs, he would have said, must be decided on 
its own merits, and according to its specific circum- 
stances. But no one who is acquainted with the 
general tenour of his political life will doubt that, 
to him, the scale was always weighted in favour of 
the higher principle ; that material advantage, and 
even material wellbeing, were, in his mind, always 
subordinated to "reason, justice, and humanity." 

II. (1790-97.) In the writings which are crowded 

into the last eight years of his life the interest is 

rather speculative than practical. This is 

Later writings. 

at once their weakness and their strength. 
As an examination of the Revolution in its historical 
causes and results they are of little value. As a 
criticism of the speculative principles on which he 
conceived it to be founded they have a significance 
which it is impossible to overrate. They were pub- 
lished in the following order : Reflections on the 
French Revolution (1790) ; A Letter to a Member of 
the National Assembly, containing a violent outbreak 
against Rousseau (1791) ; Appeal from the Ncvj to 
the Old Whigs, which, in a speculative sense, is 
perhaps deeper even than the Reflections (1791) ; 
Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) ; Remarks on the 
Policy of the Allies (1793); A Letter to a Nolle 



BRITAIN. 125 

Lord (1795); and Letters on a Regicide Peace, three in 
number, together with a large fragment of a fourth, 
originally designed to open the series (1795 - 97). 
The last five pieces are the more remarkable, because 
written under the crushing load of grief which fell 
upon him with the death of his son and only child, 
Eichard, in the summer of 1794. Yet, broken-hearted 
as he was, he had never written with a stronger 
mastery of his argument, with a fuller command of 
detail, or with a brighter glow of eloquence, than in 
three at least of these " testamentary utterances." 

The later writings of Burke seem at first sight to 
present a glaring contrast, not to say an irreconcilable 
_ • . , . contradiction, with those of his earlier 

How far to be 

reconciled with years. The Whig of 1770 has become 

the earlier. ^ fuU . blown Tory of ^^ The Libera l 

doctrine of the American and Indian speeches is 
replaced by what may justly be called the authentic 
gospel of the Conservative reaction. Nor, even on 
a closer inspection, can the contradiction wholly 
be denied. Belief in popular government and trust 
in the popular instinct have given way to distrust, 
suspicion, and contemptuous hostility. In these 
matters — and they are manifestly just the matters 
which constitute the ordinary dividing line be- 
tween Whig and Tory, Liberal and Conservative — 
it is impossible to acquit him of grave incon- 
sistency. It is also impossible to acquit him of a 
reckless departure from the rigorous method, the 
determination to bolt the facts to the bran, which 
had made the chief strength of his earlier utterances, 



126 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

But, when all this has been said, it remains true that, 
in matters more fundamental yet, he was perfectly 
consistent; and that any man who had followed his 
previous course attentively might, when the Eevolu- 
tion broke out, have confidently predicted that he 
would be found among its bitterest opponents. 
Eevolution, as such, was abhorrent to his cautious 
temper and his fervid love of order. It was doubly 
abhorrent when based on a theory of the "rights 
of men " and the inalienable claim of every man 
to an equal share in the government of the State. 
Taking fire at the first whisper of such a creed, he 
shut his eyes to all the practical gains which the 
Eevolution brought, to the redress of the grinding 
practical evils of which he can scarcely have been 
ignorant. He saw nothing but the hated theory ; and 
to destroy the credit of that theory he bent all the 
force of a genius which, now for the first time, was 
lifted to the full measure of its strength. 

Eightly or wrongly, he was convinced that the 
" professors of the rights of men " based their whole 
me ground theory of national life upon the indi- 
sM/ted. v idual, upon the conscious reason and 
the deliberate will of the individual; and that, by 
consequence, they reduced the State to a piece of 
mechanism which had been arbitrarily put together, 
and might at any moment be as arbitrarily de- 
stroyed. Against such a theory the old doctrine 
of expediency was of little avail. He was indeed 
able, on the strength of it, to point to the danger- 
ous consequences which his opponents' alleged prin- 



BRITAIN. 127 

ciples entailed. He was able to show that anarchy 
might be expected to follow, and in France had 
actually followed, upon their acceptance. But the 
French were justified in retorting that, from the 
nature of the case, anarchy could not endure for 
ever, and that anarchy itself was a less evil than 
the oppression from which they had escaped. Dimly 
conscious of the weakness of his argument on this 
side, Burke accordingly set himself to strengthen it 
on another. In so doing he fell back upon the 
conservative instinct which had always lain be- 
hind both his methods and his specific pleadings ; 
and, under stress of the revolutionary fire, he now 
raised it to the height and power of a philosophic 
principle. 

The whole argument of the revolutionists, he in- 
sisted, rests on a foundation which is rotten, on an 
Attack on in- assumption which is refuted by the plain 

oHvidualism. factg Q f the cage Tq gay that fche j^ 

dividual is the starting-point is the very reverse 
of the truth. Trace mankind backwards as far as 
you please, and you will find it is not the in- 
dividual who is the unit, but the community. The 
individual, as conceived by the revolutionists, is 
a pure abstraction, an imaginary being who never 
had, and never can have, any substantive existence. 
It is as member of a community that we know 
the individual, and as that alone. And, as member 
of a community, he has become something entirely 
different from what the imagination may conceive 
that he might have been as the unsocial, naked 



128 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

individual. In each community, and by that com- 
munity, he has been moulded to all that gives him 
the smallest worth, to all that stamps him with 
distinctive character or, as we justly say, with in- 
dividuality. It is the traditions of his particular 
race, his particular social order, his particular polity 
and religion, that have made him what he is; it is 
these that constitute his " permanent reason " and his 
true self. Without them, men would be " little better 
than the flies of a summer." 

From all this it may readily be inferred that 
national life is not the piece of artificial mechanism 
The true end which it is assumed to be by the revolu- 
0/ society. tionists. It is rather an infinitely com- 
plex growth which has formed itself by slow degrees, 
and each stage of which is conditioned by those 
that have gone before. Nor is it only that the 
present is determined by the past. It is also, and 
no less, true that each part of the whole, at every 
moment of its growth, is inseparably interwoven 
with the rest. To suppose that the political organs 
of the State are, or can be, cut off from the re- 
mainder of the national life — the civic from the 
intellectual, moral, and religious activities of the 
community — is to suppose an impossibility. Society 
exists — each nation, in its own measure and after 
its own capacity, exists — to secure the latter ends 
as well as the former. It is a partnership not 
merely in the things which affect the peace and 
order of its members within, or their strength and 
dignity without. Much more than this; "it is a 



BRITAIN. 129 

partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, 
a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection." 
Destroy the one, and the others are liable, if not 
certain, to perish with it. Indeed, there is a very 
true sense in which the deeper and more spiritual 
energies of man are absolutely dependent upon his 
political organisation ; in which the strongest sanction, 
and even the specific content, of his moral duties 
are to be found in his "social, civil relation"; in 
which, as Cicero said, his affection for his country 
"embraces all the charities of all the relations that 
bind him to his fellows." And, if this be the case, 
" no occasion can justify " a revolution " which would 
not equally authorise a dispensation with any other 
moral duty, perhaps with all of them together." To 
the existence of civil society man owes not merely 
his political life — not merely the possession of 
science and the fine arts — but his very conception 
of moral duty. 1 

From these principles two practical consequences, 

of widely differing import, are drawn by Burke. The 

_ , # . first is that, if each nation is what it is 

Each nation 

bound by its in virtue of its past, from that past it 
cannot altogether escape, however violently 
it may struggle to do so. Even if men succeed 
in throwing off the usages, and destroying the in- 
stitutions, of centuries, they still remain — France 
herself still remains — in a state of civil society, and 
the individual is hardly nearer to emancipation than 

1 See Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs. Works (London, 
1842), i. 521-526. 

T 



130 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

he was before. A new government is at once set 
over his head ; " power of some kind or other sur- 
vives the shock in which manners and opinions 
perish, and will find other, and worse, means for 
its support." Then the individual, defrauded of his 
"rights," rebels against the iniquity of the usurper; 
and brute force is invoked by the latter, as the only 
weapon remaining against anarchy. " Troops again ! 
Massacre, torture, hanging ! These are your rights 
of men ! These are the fruits of metaphysic declara- 
tions, wantonly made and shamefully retracted ! " 
Hence the first result of a revolution, which professed 
to " dissolve the people into its original moleculce" is 
to set up the irresponsible rule of a " mischievous and 
ignoble oligarchy." And, seeing that, in the general 
disruption of moral bonds, " everything depends upon 
the army," the control will ultimately fall into the 
hands of " some popular general," and the emancipa- 
tion of the individual will be found to have led 
straight to military despotism. 

The other consequence is of yet wider import. It 
applies not merely to times of revolution, but to the 
Tu state con- normal course of national existence. If 
Tmsl/m' the State embodies the better self, the 
individual. « permanent reason," of the individual, it 
follows that no State is worthy of the name in 
which provision is not made for securing the last- 
ing supremacy of that permanent reason over his 
"occasional will." The right of the individual to 
do as he pleases is subject to countless limitations, 
and to see that those limitations are observed is the 



BRITAIN. 131 

first and main reason for the existence of the State. 
In insisting upon this, the State is acting in the 
interest not only of the community, but of the in- 
dividual himself. For " government is a contrivance 
of human wisdom to provide for human ivants. Men 
have a right that their wants should be provided for 
by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned 
the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint 
upon their passions. ... In this sense, the restraints 
on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned 
among their rights. ,, 

With one omission, to be made good immediately, 
this will suffice to show the general bearings of Burke's 

, , 7 . later theory. And it will at once be ap- 

Biirkes place m J r 

the history of parent how completely he had broken away 
y * from the individualist theories which had 
prevailed since Hobbes and Locke, and how nearly 
he had approached to the conception of the State 
or nation as an organism, which was to be worked 
out in detail during the next generation by Fichte, 
Hegel, and other thinkers on the Continent. In- 
deed, having gone so far, the wonder is that he 
did not go farther ; that, having recognised the 
State as an organism, — which he does in effect, 
though not in so many words, — he did not further 
recognise that the first essential of such an organism 
is growth ; or, to drop even the semblance of metaphor, 
that the life of the community or nation is from first 
to last determined by progress. This he may, and 
occasionally does, admit in words ; but it is manifest 
that the whole tenour of his argument goes to belittle, 



132 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

or deny, it. Here, it must be confessed, his conserva- 
tive bias did him a notable disservice; it prevented 
him from following his own principles, so powerfully 
conceived and so splendidly set forth, to their logical 
conclusion. The same thing may be said of that 
hostility to the individual, which the preceding para- 
graph will have made apparent. In maintaining that 
the State is paramount — as Aristotle had said, prior — 
to the individual, he was assuredly in the right. But 
it by no means follows from this that the State is 
despotic master of the individual; still less that the 
"mass and body of individuals " — the "swinish multi- 
tude," as he calls them in one unlucky passage — should 
be excluded from a dominant voice in the government 
of the nation. His conclusions on this matter are, 
indeed, in the closest connection with his deep-rooted 
suspicion of progress. It is, as Mazzini was to point 
out, from the individual that progress commonly 
begins; it is by the reason of the individual — often, 
at first, in a minority of one — that the faults of the 
existing system are generally discerned and the means 
of correcting them discovered. This will account, on 
the one hand, for the strong hold which individualist 
theories have exercised, and still exercise, upon the 
party of progress ; and, on the other hand, for the 
equally strong aversion felt by Burke from such 
theories and from all that stands even in remote 
connection with them. 

It would be unpardonable to take leave of Burke 
without pointing to what is, in some ways, his most 
original contribution to political theory. This is the 



BRITAIN. 133 

" philosophic analogy " which he never wearies of 
Analogy between tracing between the life of the nation and 
ZSEHL the general symmetry and "order of the 
of the world. world." As the individual finds his true 
place in the nation, so the nation itself lives only 
in the larger life of civilised humanity ; so that, 
in its turn, is bound up with the whole system of 
nature, within man and without, and reflects point 
by point the working of the eternal law which comes 
from God and, under the widest diversity of forms, 
repeats itself through the whole known order of the 
universe. It is this, with the whole train of thought 
and feeling which flows from this, that gives to 
Burke's pleadings their deep note of religion, and to 
the man himself the solemnity and the rapt utterance 
of a prophet. It is this that led him to his famous 
defence of an established Church, as " an oblation of 
the State itself as a worthy offering on the high altar 
of universal praise n ; and, however much we may 
differ from the particular form of this conception, it is 
impossible not to be in sympathy with the feeling that 
prompted it. It is this that led him to denounce all 
forms of political life or theory which are not based 
on the nature of man, original or acquired, and on 
analogy with the slow and silent laws which regulate 
the being of the natural world around us. If " the 
idea of a people/' and of the corporate life which that 
carries with it, is to him " wholly artificial," that is 
because " art is man's nature." And, if reason be the 
guide of the statesman, it is not the abstract reason of 
the revolutionists, but the reason which is only another 



134 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

name for nature; "never, no never, did nature say 
one thing, and wisdom say another." 1 

Of all this there is, doubtless, a faint anticipation 
in Hooker ; of the latter part there is a shadowy reflec- 
tion in later writers, such as Comte and 

Change in the 

whole concep- Spencer. But by no writer has it been 
ion of reason. g rag p e( j so c l e arly, or stated with such a 

glow of eloquence, as by Burke. And the effects 
of such a conception reach far beyond the limits of 
merely political speculation. To say that reason 
finds expression in the whole of man's nature, in- 
stead of in the merely conscious and argumentative 
fragment of it which alone had been recognised by the 
general tendencies of eighteenth-century thought, im- 
plies a radical change, a change amounting to nothing 
less than a revolution, in the whole conception of man, 
and even of the world around him. To Burke, reason 
is no longer the purely passive and analytic faculty of 
Locke and his disciples ; it is a creative faculty, which 
draws upon the darker and more mysterious, no less 
than upon the more definite and conscious, elements 
of man's experience. In this respect, but in complete 
independence, he was moving in the same direction as 
Kant and, still more, as those disciples of Kant, 
Coleridge included, who during the first quarter of 
the next century changed the whole face of specula- 
tive philosophy. 

To claim consistency for Burke, even with the 
reservations indicated above, would be as idle as it is 

1 Works, ii. 324 (Regicide Peace, iii.). Compare i. 411, 413, 414 
(liejlections). 



BRITAIN. 135 

for other thinkers of his mark. And in his case 
there are special reasons to the contrary. A con- 
summate master of controversy, he was apt to catch 
up the first weapon that came to hand, without too 
nice a regard for the armoury from which it came. 
Thus, in defiance of his principles, he never shook 
himself entirely free from the theory of contract. 
And, when it suited his purpose, he was even ready 
to take up with a peculiarly obnoxious form of in- 
dividual rights. 1 All this, however, was in the nature 
of the case, and it detracts little, if at all, from his 
greatness as a thinker. 

Founder of a new line in thought, Burke was no 

less so in style. Contrast him with Swift, and even 

with Goldsmith, and we see at once how 

His stvlc 

widely different were his methods and 
aims. "Proper words in proper places" is at once 
the ideal of Swift and the best definition of his 
style. No style is more sinewy, none more free 
from superfluous flesh, more completely stripped to 
the bone and muscle, than his. For purely in- 
tellectual purposes and for expression of the scorn 
which of all passions stands at closest quarters with 
the intellectual temper, no style could be more 
absolutely adapted. And, apart from the ring of 
passion, this was the dominant note of the prose 
style of the century as a whole. Few writers, in- 
deed, had the same courage of their convictions as 
the author of Gulliver; most of them strove to hide 
the bareness of their weapon beneath the somewhat 

1 See Works, i. 403 {Reflections). 



136 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

faded graces of Ciceronian art. But, in spite of these 
adornments, style was to them a weapon of the intel- 
lect, and gave little reflection either to the deeper 
passions or to imagination. With Burke all this is 
changed. His essentially imaginative thought natur- 
ally found expression in a vivid and imaginative style. 
His passionate convictions, his appeal to the deeper 
springs of man's nature, to "humanity and justice/' 
demanded a richness of colouring and a wealth of 
imagery which would have sorted ill with the critical 
temper and the unimpassioned common-sense of the 
" age of reason." It is with the writers of the Com- 
monwealth, and of the age preceding the Common- 
wealth, that he is to be compared. And though there 
is no evidence that he was acquainted with them, it 
is in the prose writings of Milton that the nearest 
analogy to the style of the Reflections and the Letter 
to a Nolle Lord is to be found. The style of Milton, 
no doubt, is even more gorgeous, and it is free from 
the extravagance of which Burke was sometimes guilty. 
But in the style of Burke there is something of the 
same richness, the same easy command of all the 
resources of the language, from the most majestic 
rhetoric to the homeliest idiom of the soil, that pro- 
claimed Milton's mastery over the "cool element of 
prose"; while he unquestionably has the advantage 
of Milton in flexibility, and the structure of his sen- 
tences is far less artificial. In respect of style, no 
less than in the general tenour of his thought, the 
breach of Burke with the prevailing tendencies of 
his century was complete. And, with infinite dif- 



BRITAIN. 137 

ference of detail and cast of sentence, the nine- 
teenth century on the whole followed in his track. 
But where has he been equalled in the deep and 
sudden poetry of his phrases; in his power of pre- 
senting a train of reasoning under a succession of 
lights, each of which, while seeming to repeat, in 
reality adds fresh force to that which has gone 
before ; in his genius for embodying argument in 
imagery, for fusing imagery through and through 
with argument ? 

Eound the Reflections of Burke may be grouped 
most of the political literature which we are called 

Answers to upon to notice. Two of the best of such 

Burke. writings — Mackintosh's Vindicice Galliece 
(1791) and Paine's Eights of Man (1791-92)— were 
composed as direct answers to Burke's attack. The 
rest stood in more or less close connection with the 
controversies it excited. 

Few men would now dream of turning to Mackin- 
tosh (1765-1832) either for a judgment on the acts 
of the Eevolution or for guidance on the 

Mackintosh. . . ■■ • 

deeper issues of political speculation. And 
yet it would be easy to do worse. His answer to 
Burke's attack on the " wild waste of public evils " 
committed by the revolutionists, his exposure of what 
Burke had glorified as the "mild and lawful" rule 
of Louis XVI., are sound as far as they go. So is 
his refutation of Burke's truculent, and not too con- 
sistent, assault on " natural rights." The latter, how- 
ever, is the one point in which he comes to close 



138 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

quarters with his opponent, and he passes from it 
so quickly that it is hard to believe he realised its 
importance. In general, it may be said that he 
deals too much in matters of detail, and writes too 
much in the manner of an advocate; and he has 
no eye for the more imaginative, which is also the 
more convincing, side of Burke's argument. But 
there are effective thrusts at the bigotry of the 
Reflections. Such is the parallel between Burke's 
indictment of Dr Price and the charge of Judge 
Jeffreys at the trial of Algernon Sidney. Such again 
are the closing words in which he sweeps together the 
assailants of the Bevolution in one comprehensive 
sarcasm : " The Briefs of the Pope and the pamphlets 
of Mr Burke, the edicts of the Spanish Court and the 
mandates of the Spanish Inquisition, the Birmingham 
rioters and the Oxford graduates, equally render to 
liberty the involuntary homage of their alarm." It is 
to be hoped that Burke liked the company in which 
he found himself. 

Far more pointed was the answer of Paine (1737- 
1804). To the more speculative strain in Burke's 
genius he was constitutionally blind. But 
he was right in thinking that for the 
moment the issue was one not of theory but of prac- 
tice. He saw that the effect of Burke's pamphlet, 
if not its intention, was to goad England into war 
with her neighbour. He saw also that the principles 
laid down in it might be used — and were, in fact, 
used by Burke himself — to justify the worst abuses 
and the most cruel injustice. Eegarding the whole 



BRITAIN. 139 

plea as a tissue of sophistry, he blazed out into a 
fire of indignant protest. As a matter of political 
philosophy, his argument is little more than a re- 
assertion in rather a crude and vulgar form of the 
theory of Eights ; yet even on this side he deals some 
shrewd blows at Burke's elaborate edifice. As to the 
historical facts, he has the advantage of his antag- 
onist ; and that hardly less in relation to the practical 
grievances of the English than to the actual course 
of revolutionary events in France. Perhaps the most 
telling of his arguments, certainly one that cuts into 
the very heart of his opponent's verdict on the 
Eevolution, is that in which he contrasts Burke's 
indifference to the misery of the poor under the old 
order with his lamentations over the sufferings of the 
great under the new : M He pities the plumage, he 
forgets the dying bird/' It would be hard to pack a 
weightier criticism into fewer words. The remaining 
works of Paine, numerous as they are, call for no 
more than a passing comment. The two which made 
most stir are Common Sense (1776) and The Age of 
Reason (1795). Both show the same qualities which 
appear in the Bights of Man — a keen, if somewhat 
narrow, intellect, and an ardent love of liberty. The 
former is a masterly plea for American independence 
and American federation : " Always remember that 
our strength is continental, not provincial. " It con- 
tains, moreover, a trenchant statement of the author's 
attitude towards Government: " Society is produced 
by our wants, and government by our wickedness. . . . 
Society is in every state a blessing, but government, 



140 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

even in its best state, is but a necessary evil ; in its 
worst state, an intolerable one." The latter, which 
was mainly composed while Paine lay in prison under 
the revolutionary tyranny, is an elaborate argument 
against revealed religion and in favour of theism ; it 
carries on the tradition of the earlier deists, at whose 
loss of vogue Burke had somewhat prematurely ex- 
ulted. But Paine himself would have admitted that 
his real strength lay in politics ; and here, with all his 
limitations, he deserves our gratitude for the boldness 
with which, throughout life, he struggled against 
oppression ; prosecuted by the British government for 
a revolutionary, and, within a year, imprisoned by the 
revolutionary government for the courageous stand he 
had made against the execution of the king. 

Among the other books which owe their birth to 

the Eevolution, and in some measure, perhaps, to 

Burke's indictment of the Eevolution, the 

Godwin. 

most remarkable is Godwin's Political 
Justice (1793). 1 The fame of this has now waxed 
very dim. But at the time it had an astonishing 
influence upon some of the best intellects of the 
day, on none more than Wordsworth and, at a later 
period, Shelley. This was due to the apparently 
close texture of the argument and to the indisput- 
ably wide range which it covers. Who but Godwin 
would have thought of buttressing a political theory 
by a laboured proof of the bondage of the will? 
Yet it is by no means certain that he judged amiss ; 

1 A second edition, with large alterations, was published in 
1796. 



BRITAIN. 141 

and, in the case of Wordsworth at any rate, it was 
the metaphysical, rather than the political, argument 
that struck home. Why Wordsworth or any other 
man should have bowed the knee to Godwin, even 
for the moment, it needs now some imagination to 
discover. The style of the book is colourless, its 
temper pedantic, and its arguments hopelessly con- 
fused. Its author makes a parade of rejecting the 
term " right/' But he does so chiefly because he had 
not taken the trouble to discover the meaning which 
it bore to those who used it. The revolutionists, fol- 
lowing a wellnigh unbroken tradition of philosophy, 
employed the term in a strictly political sense. God- 
win interprets it in a purely moral sense, and rides 
off* on the plea that, morally speaking, no man has a 
right to do as he pleases, and consequently that "right" 
is no better than a high-sounding synonym for wrong. 
The " justice," however, which he sets up in the place 
of "right," proves on examination to be little more 
than right under another name. It is no less abstract 
a conception ; it is as completely bound up with the 
individualist theory of the State ; it debars, and was 
intended by Godwin to debar, the State from limiting 
the freedom of the individual no less than the theory 
of Eights, which it affected to dethrone. Still more 
fatal than such inconsistencies is the assumption, 
which runs from beginning to end of the treatise, that 
the existing system of society — " this vain world, that 
kings and priests are plotting in" — is the work of 
brute force and deception ; but that Eeason, the highly 
attenuated reason of eighteenth- century philosophy, 



142 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

will one day dawn, and ultimately the whole world 
become a convert to Political Justice. No heroic 
efforts, Godwin is convinced, are needed to secure 
this desirable end. So inevitable is it that, if only 
the truth be pertinaciously preached, it will come 
about of itself. It is small wonder that, when the 
ministry of the day debated whether there were any 
need to prosecute the author, Pitt should have argued 
that he might safely be let alone. Godwin, in truth, 
was not of the stuff of which revolutionists are made, 
and, when the Whigs at last came into power, he 
subsided into a small Government office. But neither 
this nor the drab meagreness of his political ideal 
should blind us to the honourable part he played at the 
height of the anti-Jacobin panic. In his letter to Chief- 
Justice Eyre (1794), as well as in his more elaborate 
treatise, he boldly upheld the standard of freedom, 
and did perhaps more than any other man, Erskine 
excepted, to win the British Jury against a system of 
terrorism of which Pitt himself had the magnanimity 
to be more than half ashamed. And it is as a protest 
against the evils of his own day — some, though none 
too many, of which have been since reformed — that 
we must accept his doctrine of Punishment, of Grati- 
tude, of Education, of " man Equal, unclassed, tribe- 
less and nationless/' which, strangely enough, inspired 
one of the most poetic visions of Shelley. Godwin is 
further memorable as the first, or nearly the first, of 
the long line of literary anarchists. Communism, 
free love, the abolition of taxation, may reckon him 
among their prophets. The State, property, marriage 



BRITAIN. 143 

— death itself — went down beneath his blows; or 
would have done so, had words the force of deeds. 

Political Justice was only an episode in the long life 
of Godwin. His other labours range from a History 
of Chatham to Faulkner, a Tragedy ; and from a Life 
of Chaucer to Caleb Williams and St Leon. Of these, 
the two last only survive. They have been noticed in 
connection with the history of the novel. 

It remains to speak of a man whose influence over 

the next two generations surpassed that of any other 

thinker, and who, through the writings of 

Bentham. . . 

his disciples, still speaks to the men ot 
our own day — Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). From 
the long list of his works, which fill eleven closely 
printed volumes, two only need be taken by name 
— the Fragment on Government (1776) and Principles 
of Morals and Legislation (privately printed 1780, 
published 1789). The former, avowedly a criticism 
on a well-known passage of Blackstone's Comment- 
aries, is incidentally a statement of Bentham's views 
on political philosophy. The latter, a far more 
elaborate work, expounds the utilitarian doctrine in 
its two main applications, to individual conduct and 
to legislative action. In these two works the germs 
of nearly all that he taught are implicitly contained. 

The " utilitarian " theory, the " greatest happiness 

principle," was first and foremost a moral doctrine, 

as moral suggested by the problems of man's moral 

philosopher. life> and i nten( ied as a key to unlock their 

difficulties. It is right, therefore, to begin with the 

Principles of Morals. Bentham was profoundly con- 



144 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

vinced that such terms as " conscience " and "moral 
sense" — nay, if they are to be pressed to their 
strictest connotation, even " right " and " duty " — 
merely confuse the issue, and that all action is to 
be tested by expediency, all moral judgment to be 
reduced to a calculation of pleasure. An action is 
right if it tends to produce pleasure; wrong, if it 
tends to produce an overplus of pain. Two things, 
however, must be carefully borne in mind. Firstly, 
the pleasure in question is not, and must not be, 
confined to the pleasure carried by the single act; 
it is essentially the pleasure of a lifetime. That 
action is not necessarily the best, of which the 
pleasure at the moment is the most intense. For 
experience shows that the most intense pleasures are 
apt to be not only the shortest, but also the most 
likely to bring pain as an after consequence ; whereas 
the pleasures which, for the moment, are milder 
are, on the whole, found to be those which are most 
likely to reproduce themselves, to be fruitful of like 
pleasures in the future. Secondly, the pleasure 
sought must be not only the pleasure of the individ- 
ual agent, but that of the greatest possible number of 
his fellow-men. 

In one respect, it is impossible to overrate the 
service which Bentham rendered to ethical inquiry. 
Utility may not be, and is not, a principle sufficient to 
account for all the acts which enter into our estimate 
of a man's moral worth. Still less is it a principle 
sufficient to account for the fact that he acts under 
a sense of obligation. But, the sense of obligation or 



BRITAIN. 145 

duty once given, it is by its utility, and by that alone, 
that the character of each act, as apart from the char- 
acter of the agent, is to be judged. And Bentham 
was right in holding that the neglect of this truth 
is to answer for most, if not all, of the conscientious 
errors which have caused so much waste, and often so 
much misery, to mankind. Nor must we forget that, 
if during the last century this has come to be more 
and more fully acknowledged, that is mainly due to 
the influence of Bentham. 

Yet in spite of this signal merit — a merit which 
no wise man will disregard — the gaps in Bentham's 
system are sufficiently glaring ; far more glaring than 
in that of his master, Hume. His attempt to dispose 
of the idea of duty must be held to have entirely 
broken down. Even if self-regarding actions could 
be explained without it — which in many cases they 
can not — an act of self-sacrifice, still more of martyr- 
dom, for the sake of others would remain an impene- 
trable mystery ; or rather, it would be utterly without 
justification. With all his apparatus of " sanctions " 
— physical, social, political, and the rest — Bentham 
does not for one moment succeed in bridging the 
gulf between the interest of society and the operative 
pleasure of the individual; not to mention the fact 
that, in the case of martyrdom, all the sanctions, with 
the single exception of the religious, — which, on Ben- 
tham's own showing, has no business to be there at 
all, — operate with one accord in the wrong direction. 
Again, if the morality of an act really depends on the 
correctness with which its consequences in the way 

K 



146 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of pleasure are calculated, what justice would there 
be in punishment? To punish a man for no better 
reason than that he has acted under a misappre- 
hension would be one of the maddest courses it is 
possible to conceive. Yet no moralist is more rigid 
to insist on the necessity of punishment than the 
man who devised the "felicific calculus." 

When we pass to the legislative side of Bentham's 
doctrine, we are at once conscious of standing on 
as legislative firmer ground. Here his speculative weak- 
reformer. nesg — or w h a ^ by comparison, must pass 
for such — counts for little. He stands out in his full 
strength as practical reformer — a reformer of legal 
theory ; and, what is still more important, a reformer 
of the abuses which had disgraced English law with 
a most barbarous practice. Here he follows Beccaria, 
and moves with the general current of his time. But 
it is not too much to say that, of all the men who 
took part in the reform of our criminal law, Bentham 
laboured the hardest and left the deepest mark behind 
him. Nor would it be fair to forget that this was a 
direct result of his utilitarian convictions. 

His merits as political philosopher are more 

equivocal. Powerful to destroy, his weakness ap- 

as political pears the moment he attempts to build. 

philosopher. Hig criticism of Blackstone, though not 

entirely fair, is sound in essentials and brilliant in 
execution. Equally sound, equally brilliant, but 
without the unfairness, is his assault on the theory 
of contract. But, when it comes to construction, he 
has nothing better to offer than the principle of 



BRITAIN. 147 

" utility " ; " the principle which alone depends not 
upon any higher reason, but which is itself the 
sole and all-sufficient reason for every point of 
practice whatsoever." At first sight we might be 
tempted to suppose that we have here, under another 
name, the expediency of Burke. And no one will 
deny the affinity between the theory of Bentham or 
that of Hume, from whom he derived it, on the one 
hand, and that of Burke on the other. But, in fact, 
there is all the difference in the world between ex- 
pediency, pure and simple, as it is in Hume or 
Bentham, and expediency qualified by wider and 
higher principles — by instinct, by tradition, by a 
tissue of moral and religious ideals — as it is in 
Burke. For the practical needs of the moment, it 
is probable that Bentham's "philosophic radicalism" 
— in itself a somewhat thin and bald conception — 
was a safer guide than the deeper and richer theory 
of Burke. But, as a principle to account for the 
political life of man, in its historical origin and its 
historical development, it will not stand the com- 
parison for an instant. 

Intensely keen on one side, that of practical reform, 
the mind of Bentham must be admitted to have lacked 
breadth ; and he was incapable of seeing beyond the 
four corners of his own theories. Moreover, there was 
a curious strain of pedantry in his nature — a pedantry 
which comes out not only in his thought, but in his 
later style. So long as he gave himself a chance, his 
style, though a trifle diffuse, was remarkable for its 
vivacity. And there is no better example of it than 



148 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the Fragment on Government. But in later years he 
deliberately adopted a pseudo-mathematical jargon, to 
which the technical language of German philosophy 
is grace itself. Yet the practical services he rendered 
to his own country and mankind are so great, the 
stimulus he gave to thought in his own day was so 
healthy, that it is ungracious to dwell on his weak- 
nesses and limitations. 

Mill, in a well-known essay, speaks of Bentham as 
one of " the two seminal minds " of the last century, 
Coleridge as and of Coleridge as the other. And if 
philosopher. we ta k e foe words, as they were clearly 
meant, to refer to speculative tendencies, he was 
probably in the right in both cases. But, whereas 
Bentham left a large mass of published writing 
behind him, the written prose of Coleridge might 
easily be held in three very moderate volumes. 
What is more, not one of them, with the exception 
of Biographia Literavia, can claim to be of permanent 
value. The individual thoughts are too vague, the 
connection too loose, to leave any definite or lasting 
impression on the mind of the reader. It was, in 
fact, not by his books but by his talk that Coleridge 
stamped himself upon his age. In talk his indolence 
found a stimulus, which the pen was powerless to 
give. And in talk, though here he was sometimes 
precise enough, even vagueness itself, thanks to his 
marvellous eloquence, conveyed a more or less defi- 
nite meaning. And, after all, what he had to say 
was far more impressive in its general scope than 
when he pursued it into minute detail. His real task 



BRITAIN. 149 

was to deliver his testimony against the materialist 
creed of his day, to lay stress upon the abiding 
element of mystery in man and nature. And, lack- 
ing as he did the industry — perhaps the power of 
consecutive thought — which enabled Kant, for in- 
stance, to argue the case in detail, nothing was left 
him but to reiterate his cardinal doctrine in all the 
forms that a boundless imagination placed within his 
reach — a work which no book could have accom- 
plished with half the results that flowed from his 
spoken eloquence. The scattered fragments of his 
conversation — but they are no more than crumbs 
from the rich man's table — are to be found in his 
Table Talk. A brilliant description of it, but with 
more than an edge of sarcasm, forms the most strik- 
ing chapter in Carlyle's Life of Sterling. There is 
another, equally brilliant and scarcely less touched 
with mockery, in the Letters of Keats. Best of all, 
if only because it is more appreciative, is the picture 
of him, as he was in his glorious dawn, by Hazlitt. 
One thing only needs to be added. The most definite 
outcome of this abounding flow of talk is to be seen 
in the religious, rather than in the speculative, thought 
of his time. And it told in two different, if not op- 
posite, directions. Coleridge was, in fact, the father 
of the broad -church movement; and he was god- 
father of the high - church. On the one hand, he 
was the master of such men as Maurice ; on the other 
hand, he did yeoman's service in preparing the ground 
for that conception of the Church which was after- 
wards elaborated by Newman. "The two strongest 



150 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

proofs of Christianity/' he once said, " are Christianity 
and Christendom." And, as time went on, he came 
more and more to identify the latter with the Church. 
In the history of literary criticism Coleridge holds 
a place apart. On his writings and lectures all that is 
As uterary most valuable in English criticism, during 
critic. at i eas j. foe first half of last century, may 
be said to rest. His critical work is contained in 
Biographia Liter aria (1817); to a small extent in 
the Friend and Table Talk ; to a much larger in the 
fragmentary records of his lectures. The latter were 
delivered at intervals from 1808 1 to 1819. They 
deal, for the most part, either with first principles 
or with the poetry and drama of England, particu- 
larly in the Elizabethan and Stuart age. He com- 
bines, in a degree unusual even with great critics, 
the two powers which are most essential to dis- 
tinction in this field — a poet's sense of beauty, 
and what falls short of beauty, in the conception 
and execution of any literary work that comes 
before him, and a philosopher's genius for analysis, 
for tracking poetic effects to their hidden causes, for 
estimating the success with which, in a given imagin- 
ative product, means have been proportioned to ends. 
To these he adds a quality which is distinct from 
either of them, though closely connected with the 
latter — a keen eye for the speculative issues involved 

1 A previous course (1802), or courses, would seem to have been 
the creation of Coleridge's imagination, intended to parry the charge 
of plagiarism from Schlegel. Nor was even the course of 1806, 
though undoubtedly planned, ever delivered. 



BRITAIN. 151 

in imaginative creation ; a faculty which, quite apart 
from that of criticism in the stricter sense, enabled 
him, with all his indolence, to leave at least the 
scattered fragments of what in Germany would be 
called an "aesthetic." It is in handling the Eliza- 
bethan Drama and the poetry of Wordsworth that he 
is seen at his best. The Elizabethan Drama to him 
means, it may fairly be objected, little beyond Shake- 
speare; the other playwrights — Jonsou, Massinger, 
Beaumont and Fletcher — are introduced chiefly, 
though by no means solely, as foils to Shakespeare ; 
and two at least of the greatest — Ford and Webster — 
seem to have been neglected altogether. But though 
there is some force in this criticism, what he con- 
tributed to a sound judgment of Shakespeare, and the 
requirements of the Drama in general, is so solid and 
so brilliant that his position is left practically un- 
shaken. So also with his pronouncement on Words- 
worth. Considering that Wordsworth's poetry was 
but just beginning to win its way against prejudice 
and obloquy, the verdict of Coleridge may be held 
to have more of the candid friend than is altogether 
pleasant. And Wordsworth himself seems to have 
been wounded. This, however, is a matter which 
affects the personal delicacy of the critic, not the 
justice of his criticism. And, bating a slight tend- 
ency to find unnecessary fault, that criticism, both 
in its wider and its narrower aspects, remains one 
of the most penetrating in the language. 

From Coleridge, as critic, it is natural to pass to 
his lifelong friend and clear-sighted admirer, Lamb 



152 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

(1775-1834). Of the speculative strain, which was 
so strong in Coleridge, there is no trace 
in Lamb; it is probable that he would 
not have accepted it even at a gift. His range, 
too, is more limited, and, even within that range, 
he takes and leaves with a touch of waywardness. 
But where his admiration is roused, his sense of 
poetic beauty is even subtler than Coleridge's; and 
his vivid humour, his intense humanity, impelled him 
always to seize that which binds literature to the 
common lot of mankind : to seek in poetry the re- 
flection of the very passions and cravings which stirred 
the artist's own soul, and which find an echo — though 
it may be a softened and a broken echo — in the heart 
of others less gifted than himself. To Coleridge litera- 
ture may be said to end in itself ; and, for many pur- 
poses, it may well be treated as doing so. Lamb, 
without ever sinking into the moralist, has the still 
rarer faculty of reaching behind the purely literary 
quality of a book to the vital pulsations, of which it 
is the imaginative register. Hence, on the one hand, 
his quick sense of all that is heroic and chivalrous in 
the Elizabethan dramatists, and, on the other hand, 
the instinct which impels him, wherever possible, to 
illustrate his reading of a drama from the conception, 
the tones, the gestures of actors whom he had seen on 
the stage. He may not always succeed in catching 
the mood which the dramatist himself most probably 
had in view ; his love of paradox was sometimes an 
obstacle in his way, but it is always this that he 
endeavours to seize. Thus, brief as they are, the 



BRITAIN. 153 

criticisms which he attaches to his chief work in this 
field, Selections from the Elizabethan Dramatists (1808), 
are gems never surpassed. Apart from the apprecia- 
tive intensity of his critical work, his main service 
perhaps is to have broken down the limits which had 
commonly been imposed on the study of our Drama. 
Previous critics, Coleridge himself not excepted, had, 
except for parallel passages, looked little beyond 
Shakespeare. Lamb was the first to treat the Eliza- 
bethan Drama, the age from 1580 to 1640, as a whole. 
It can only be regretted that, as critic, he wrote 
comparatively little. Besides the Selections, there 
are scattered pieces of criticism in the Essays of 
Elia (from 1820 onwards), and in his incomparable 
letters. But that is all. 

The only other critical work it is necessary to 
mention is that of the Edinburgh and Quarterly, — 
Edinburgh and the former founded in 1802, the latter, 
Quarterly. ag a political counterblast, in 1809. The 
editor of the Edinburgh was Sydney Smith, and 
then Jeffrey, with Brougham and, at first, Scott as 
chief contributors. Gifford, as has been said, was 
editor of the Quarterly, his most distinguished con- 
tributors being Scott, Southey, and Ellis. It can 
hardly be said that these reviews added much either 
to the finer or the more solid endowments of criti- 
cism. But they spoke with more authority than 
the old Criticals and Monthlies; in spite of their 
flippancy and savagery, they were not seldom just 
in their verdicts ; and they were, on the whole, well 
written. 



154 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

We pass to a very different field, that of oratory. 
This period, by universal admission, was the heroic 

orators: age of parliamentary eloquence. Chatham, 

Chatham. B ur k e> Yox } Grattan, Sheridan, and the 
younger Pitt were all in full activity; and they are 
only the captains of an army containing several men 
with attainments little lower than their own. Of 
the leaders, Chatham (1708-1778) was in all prob- 
ability the greatest — greatest as statesman, greatest 
also as orator. In spite of what has sometimes been 
alleged, he was, of all orators, the most natural and 
the most spontaneous. Taking generally, as has 
been well said, the tone of "inspired conversation," 
he rises to sudden outbursts of unbidden passion, 
which sweep away all opposition as chaff before the 
wind. Such was the appeal of his last speech in 
the Commons (1766) — " Sir, I rejoice that America 
has resisted." Such was his fiery denunciation of the 
employment of Red Indians, " hell-hounds," against 
the colonists, in the last year of his life (1777). Yet, 
with all his passion, few speakers could weave an 
argument more closely; witness his various exposi- 
tions of foreign policy, a subject of which he was 
supreme master; witness, in a very different vein, 
his attack on Lord Mansfield for his conduct at the 
famous trial of Woodfall (1770). 

To the reader the speeches of Burke will always 
remain masterpieces unapproached. And it is a mis- 
take to suppose that, even as spoken, they 
were ineffective. His great efforts, like 
that on Conciliation with America, may be some- 



BRITAIN. 155 

what too literary in style and have too much of 
the essay in their method. But this is not the case 
with the speeches which he threw off night after 
night on the spur of the moment. These, as all 
the evidence goes to prove, were — at any rate in his 
earlier years — admirably suited for their purpose ; 
and the readiness, to which they witness, made him 
for many years virtual leader of the Opposition. 
Yet, after all, it is on the more elaborate orations 
that his fame really rests ; on the wisdom, the grasp 
both of detail and principle, on the beauty of style 
and the high imagination, in all of which they stand 
unrivalled. 

Fox (1749-1806) is in many points the very anti- 
thesis of Burke. In the higher flights of oratory he 
is comparatively weak. He is, above all 
a great debater ; a debater, however, who 
carries the sustained passion of the orator into the 
cut and thrust of argumentative fence: "reason and 
passion fused together," according to the verdict of 
Macaulay. The finest example of his powers is per- 
haps the speech on the Eussian Armament (1792). 
Here he had his great adversary clearly at a dis- 
advantage, and he drives his blows home with 
merciless insistence. It is significant — and the 
circumstances attending this speech are a striking 
instance of the fact — that he was the only opponent 
whom Pitt commonly thought it worth his while 
seriously to answer. 

With Sheridan and Grattan we return to the 
Irish tradition, partly represented by Burke. And, 



156 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

if Fox was the most unadorned of orators, Sheridan 
shcridan, was the most ornate. His style, partly 
a rattan. f or t j ia {. reason, did not lend itself to 
the imperfect reporting of that day, and little more 
than the wreck of his eloquence has come down to 
us. But on the rare occasions when he shook off 
his indolence he seems to have fairly eclipsed all 
his rivals, who unanimously pronounced the first of 
his "Begum speeches " (1787) to be, as Burke put it, 
" the most astonishing effort of eloquence, argument, 
and wit united, of which there is any record or tradi- 
tion." And his powers both of passionate appeal and 
of raillery remained even in the gloom of his closing 
years. Of Grattan's eloquence (1746-1820), which was 
hardly less ornate, the records are less imperfect. His 
greatest effort was probably his impassioned plea 
against the Union, which was the swan -song of the 
Irish Parliament (1800). And few things in the 
whole range of eloquence are finer than the passage 
in which, with a lover's devotion, he asserted the 
indestructible life of Irish nationality,— 

" Thou art not conquered ; beauty's ensign yet 
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, 
And death's pale flag is not advanced there." 

In the English Parliament he was always something 
of an alien, though Pitt, who was immensely tickled 
by the extravagance of his gestures, magnanimously 
went out of his way to gain him a respectful hearing. 
Very different was the oratory of Pitt (1759-1806). 
In genius for exposition, he is comparable to Glad- 



BRITAIN. 157 

stone; in stateliness, it is probable that he stands 
alone among the orators of our nation. 

Pitt. . ° _ _ _. . 

At times, too, he gave play to qualities 
not ordinarily associated with these. His power 
of retort was terrible, his sarcasm scathing ; and 
he was capable of an imaginative splendour which 
few orators, if any, have surpassed. The crucial 
instance of the last quality is to be found in his 
speech on the Slave Trade (1792), the last half- 
hour of which, as Wilberforce proudly testifies, was 
" one unbroken torrent of majestic eloquence," and it 
certainly closes with one of the finest images in the 
records of eloquence. With him, as with his father, 
what seems to have struck the hearers most was the 
nobility of character, the inflexible resolution, which 
lay behind his great powers of speech and gave double 
weight to every word. And there is one speech — the 
last words he ever uttered in public — which, even at 
the distance of a century, gives some impression of 
what was habitually felt by those who heard him. 
At the Mayor's banquet, a few days after Trafalgar, 
the health of the great Minister was proposed as " the 
saviour of Europe." " He was not up for more than 
two minutes," said Wellington, who was present, "but 
his reply was perfect : ' Let us hope that England, 
having saved herself by her energy, may save Europe 
by her example.' " 

Before passing to the next chapter, it may be 
well to go beyond the bounds of our own country 
and to glance at some of those achievements, on 



158 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

which it is impossible to dwell at length, but which, 
throughout western Europe, did much to 

Intellectual & * ' 

advance in forni the intellectual background of the 
Europe. a ^ These may be roughly divided into 
the advance of Learning and that of Natural Science. 
As for Learning, this period saw the creation of 
the History of Literature. It saw also the applica- 
study of older tion— in germ— of entirely new methods 
Literature. fa History and Theology. In the study 
of Literature three tendencies, closely connected 
with each other, may be distinguished. There was 
a closer study of detail — in particular, a keener 
eye for the sources and antiquities of the various 
national literatures — than had ever been known 
before. There was an equally strong desire to 
grasp the history and bearings of each literature 
as a whole. Finally, there was an endeavour to 
apply to literature — in particular, of course, to its 
older monuments — the critical principles which 
minute learning, interpreted by the wider outlook 
of the time, had laid ready to hand. The first of 
these tendencies is, in this country, best represented 
by Tyrwhitt, whose edition of the Canterbury Tales 
(1775) is a monument of scholarly acuteness, and 
displays a knowledge of mediaeval literature — French, 
Provencal, and Italian — such as no previous, and few 
subsequent, writers have attained. The editio princeps 
of Beowulf, by Thorkelin, though it was not published 
till 1815, in reality dates from this period. For the 
unique manuscript was copied by him in 1786, and 
the book itself was ready for publication, when the 



BRITAIN. 159 

greater part of it was destroyed in the bombardment 
of Copenhagen (1807). This must be regarded as 
the most important event in the history of old Eng- 
lish scholarship since the appearance of Hickes' Thes- 
aurus (1703-5). It is hardly creditable to our nation 
that such a service should have been rendered by a 
foreigner. In France, we may recall the enormous 
labours of Sainte-Palaye (1697-1781), the last volume 
of whose Mimoires sur Vancienne Chevalerie appeared 
in the year before his death, 1 and who left behind him 
a monumental Dictionary of Old and Mediaeval French, 
the first volume of which appeared in 1789, but 
which has not been completely published till our own 
day. In Germany, the land of learning, we must 
content ourselves with two points. The first is the 
life-work of Heyne (1729-1812), whose Virgil appeared 
in successive editions from 1767 to 1803 ; Pindar, in 
the same fashion, from 1774 to 1798 (the last edition 
including the Fragments, Scholia, and Hermann's 
Essay on the Metres); and the Iliad in 1802. The 
chief importance of all three, together with his 
numerous Essays, is, in the first place, their deep 
learning ; and, in the second, that Heyne was among 
the earliest, if not the earliest, of modern scholars to 
treat the classics as literature, and, what is hardly less 
significant, as an embodiment of the traditions, myths, 
beliefs of the ancient world. In this respect he is 
the worthy forerunner of his pupil, Wolf, and presents 
a notable contrast with his younger contemporary, 
Porson. The other point to be mentioned is the 

1 The two previous ones in 1759. 



160 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

editio princeps of the Nibelungenlied, by C. H. My Her, 
in 1782 ; x the first sign of that renewed interest in the 
heroic literature of the nation which worked with so 
profound an effect upon the generation following that 
of Herder and Goethe. It may be added that the 
editio princeps of the Edda began to appear at Copen- 
hagen in 1787; it was not completed till 1828. 

Of the beginnings of the History of Literature, in 
the strictest sense, — of that study which treats litera- 
Historyof ture as the expression of the life of a 
Literature. g{ ven na tion, as determined by that life, 
and, like it, as subject to an intelligible law of 
progress, — it is unnecessary to say much. It will 
fall to be spoken of in connection with Friedrich 
Schlegel. The one work to be mentioned here is 
Warton's History of English Poetry (1774-78), which 
may fairly claim to be the earliest History of a 
national literature to be attempted in any country. 
The arrangement, no doubt, is bad ; the sense of 
proportion, weak; the connection between one period 
and another is most imperfectly explained. But the 
learning is wide, as well as deep; and on not a few 
points the book remains an authority to the present 
day. It is significant that the first History of Litera- 
ture should have come from the hand of one who, 
both in his critical essays and his original poems, had 
shown himself a staunch supporter of the romantic 
revolt. 

Among those who applied critical principles to the 

1 Bodmer had published the latter part of the Lied (Kriemhild's 
Revenge), together with the Klage, in 1757. 



BRITAIN. 161 

older monuments of literature it must suffice to 
mention Wolf, whose edition of Homer, 

Wolf. 

with the famous Prolegomena, was pub- 
lished in 1795. The object of this memorable 
treatise is to prove that the Homeric poems con- 
sisted originally of short, separate lays, possibly by 
various authors ; that these were not put together 
as two connected poems until the age of Pisistratus ; 
and that they did not assume the shape in which 
we have them — a shape which is still marked by 
many awkward transitions — until the time of the 
Ptolemies, perhaps of Aristarchus (circ. 200 B.C.). 
The bare germs of this theory had been anticipated 
by scholars like Bentley, or again by philosophers 
like Vico and Eousseau. 1 But the depth of learn- 
ing and the acuteness of argument with which it 
was expounded by Wolf are all his own, and give 
it an entirely new character and value. In the next 
generation it was applied by Grimm and Lachmann 
to the Nibehtngenlied, and to the " popular epic " 
in general. Yet later, it was used as a weapon in 
the controversies which raged round the Old Testa- 
ment and the New. 2 Few books have been so 
pregnant with results. 

Neither in History nor in Theology is there so 

1 By Bentley in 1713 (see Prolegomena, §27); by Rousseau in 
Sur VOrigine des Langues (ib., § 20). I am not aware that Wolf 
makes any reference to Vico. But see Scienza Nuova (second 
version, 1730), Book III., especially pp. 428, 432, 445, 448, 450 (ed. 
Ferrari). 

2 Wolf himself cautiously suggests the application to the Old 
Testament : Prolcg., § 35. 

L 



162 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

marked an advance to be noted as in literary study. 
Yet here, too, a new dawn is to be traced. 
The monumental work of Gibbon (1776- 
1788) belongs, in spirit, to the preceding period. But 
in the amazing industry and insight which he brought 
to his sources — we may add, in his genius for massing 
facts and events in orderly array — he introduced a 
new ideal into historical research. And it was half a 
century before his example was adequately followed. 
From the nature of his material, throughout the bulk 
of his work, it was impossible that he should employ 
"sources," in the sense of original documents. For 
Roman history, Inscriptions are the only thing coming 
under that head ; and Inscriptions were practically a 
sealed book till the days of Mommsen. We may note, 
however, that such writers as Schlozer (1737-1809) 
and Johannes Muller (1752-1809) display a deeper 
sense of the crucial importance of such material than 
had previously been common: the former, in his 
edition of the Eussian Chronicle of Nestor (1802); 
the latter, in his Schweizergeschichte (1786-1808). In 
the case of Muller this is the more remarkable, as his 
main search was for the picturesque. 

In theology likewise, it was an age rather of prep- 
aration than of absolute performance. Michaelis 
(1727-1790) and Eichhorn (1752-1827), 

Theology. ' x ' 

.both learned orientalists, may be said to 
have laid the foundation for much subsequent criti- 
cism of traditional beliefs; the latter especially, in 
his edition of the Apocalypse (1791). But the most 
original thinker in this field was undoubtedly Schleier- 



BRITAIN. 163 

macher (1768-1834), who combined a fearless criti- 
cism with the deepest piety and a heroic endeav- 
our to disentangle the essence of Christianity from 
the historical forms in which it has been delivered. 
This was especially the aim of his Eeden ilber die 
Religion (1799). His best known works, the edition 
of Saint Luke and Der Christliche Glaube, belong to 
a later date (1817, 1822). The criticism of earlier 
days had, in the main, been an unlearned criti- 
cism. That of our period, and still more of the fol- 
lowing one, was profoundly learned. Schleiermacher 
at the close of the eighteenth century — Strauss, Baur, 
and Eenan in the first three-quarters of the nine- 
teenth — were at least as erudite as their orthodox 
opponents. The result of this, together with the 
popularisation of scientific theory, has been to change 
the whole fabric of current theology, from top to 
bottom. 

Far more startling was the progress of Natural 
Science. Franklin's discoveries in Electricity, it is 
chemistry true, fall before our period. But they were 
and Biology. carr i e( j further, during these years, by Volta 
and Galvani. It is, however, in two other sciences 
that the most astonishing results were attained. The 
last third of the eighteenth century saw the creation 
of modern Chemistry. It saw the first beginnings of 
evolutionary Biology. By the discovery of Oxygen 
(1774), Priestley, unknown to himself, gave the first 
shock to the dominant theory of the old Chemistry — 
that which assumed the existence of a specific element, 
phlogiston, the sole source of combustion. And the 



164 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

process of demolition was continued, with fuller con- 
sciousness of its significance, by Cavendish and, yet 
more, by Lavoisier (1743-1794), on whose pre-emin- 
ence in all the qualities that go to make scientific 
genius all authorities are agreed. To him we owe, 
moreover, the establishment of the indestructibility of 
matter, as well as the general application of quanti- 
tative methods. This was carried further by Dalton, 
in his theory of the atomic composition of bodies 
(1804). It may be added that Davy was the first 
to bring electrical into connection with chemical 
science (1806). So that, within the space of a gener- 
ation, not only had the foundations of chemical doc- 
trine been securely laid, but the methods of chemical 
research had been substantially fixed. Of Biology 
there is less need to speak. It must suffice to say 
that the theory of biological evolution was vaguely 
anticipated by Erasmus Darwin (1794), more definitely 
by Lamarck (1801-9); and, as we shall see in the 
next chapter, it was beaten out, it may well be in an 
exaggerated form, but with an extraordinary com- 
bination of observation and intuition, by Goethe, 
mainly during the ten or twelve years onwards from 
1784. In this connection, it is well to refer to the 
work of Malthus. At the time of its publication 
(1798) the Essay on Population was naturally re- 
garded as bearing solely on Economic Science. It 
was not until a generation and more had passed that 
its wider import was suspected. But both Charles 
Darwin and Mr Wallace have borne witness to the 
influence which it had on the formation of their 



BRITAIN. 165 

opinions as to the struggle for existence and the 
survival of the fittest — in other words, on the theory 
of biological evolution. 

It is needless to dwell on the vast significance of all 
this. By such discoveries the world became at once 
more intelligible, and more mysterious, to man. His 
beliefs were profoundly modified. His imagination 
was deeply stirred. Even in the poetry of the time 
the effects of this may be traced. "Poetry," said 
Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all 
science." He himself, it is true, did little to work 
out this pregnant idea in practice. But, for ex- 
amples in abundance, we need only turn to the 
poetry of Goethe or of Shelley. 

Consult, among other works, Dictionary of National Biography ; 
Chambers's Encyclopaedia of English Literature (new ed.), 1903; 
Saintsbury, A Short History of English Literature, 1898 ; Herford, 
The Age of Wordsworth, 1897 ; Southey, Life and Letters of William 
Cowper, 7 vols., 1836; Angellier, Robert Burns, 2 vols., 1895; 
Sampson, Blake's Poetical Works, 1905 ; Coleridge's Poetical Works 
(ed. J. F. Campbell), 1893 ; The Works of Wordsworth (with Intro- 
duction by J. Morley), 1889 ; Raleigh, Wordsicorth, 1903 ; Legouis, 
La Jeunesse de Wordsicorth, 1896 ; Grosart, The Prose Works of 
William Wordsicorth, 3 vols., 1876 ; Lockhart, Life of Scott, 7 vols., 
1837 ; Letters of Scptt, 2 vols., 1894 ; Morley, Burke in English Men 
of Letters, also the earlier Study; Kegan Paul, William Godivin, 
his Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols., 1876 ; Mill, Essays on 
Coleridge and Bentham in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i. ; 
The Modern Orator, 2 vols., 1845-48. 



166 



CHAPTEE II. 

GERMANY. 

Frederick's attack on German literature — assertion of german 
individuality — difficulties of the task — lessing — early 
work in poetry and drama — ' miss sara sampson' — lessing 
and diderot — ' minna von barnhelm ' — ' emilia galotti ' — 
'nathan' — its occasion — lessing as critic — his learning — 
his genius for analysis — his relation to different types 
of classicism — 'laokoon' — limitations of his view — lessing 
and kant — the new period — the enlightenment — the medie- 
valists — 'sturm und drang ' — romantic school — hellenism — 
wieland — weimar — winckelmann : his aims — his relation to 
lessing — his influence, on goethe in particular— herder : 
pioneer of evolution — enthusiast and critic — ' ideen ' — 
philosophy of history — his literary work — herder and 
lessing — ' kritische w alder ' — primitive poetry — his relation 
to romance — his limitations — burger's ballads — his lyrics 
— goethe : his range — gotz — werther — ' triumph der 
empfindsamkeit ' — early lyrics — italian journey — its in- 
fluence on his life and art — poems of second period — 
1 iphigenie ' — ' roman elegies ' and ' metamorphose der 
pflanzen' — goethe and erasmus darwin — goethe as man of~ 
science — his methods and ideas — bearing of these on his 
poetry — friendship with schiller — ' xenien ' — ' wilhelm 
meister ' — its aims — its stronger and weaker side — ' hermann 
und Dorothea' — its greatness — compared with Wordsworth's 
1 pastorals ' — ballads — ' naturliche tochter ' — ' faust ' : its 
composition — the ' faust ' legend — goethe's handling of it — 
his boldness in recasting it — his conception of mephis- 
topheles — second part of ' faust ' — goethe as critic — as 
lyric poet and dramatist — influence of hellenism — his 



GERMANY. 167 

RELATION TO ROMANCE, AND TO CLASSICISM — SCHILLER — ' DIE 
RAUBER ' — EARLY LYRICS — SECOND PERIOD — ' DON CARLOS ' — 
ADVANCE IN DRAMATIC GENIUS — LYRICS OF THIS PERIOD — 'DIE 
RUSTLER' — PROSE WORKS — THIRD PERIOD— LYRICS — ' DAS REICH 
DER SCHATTEN ' — REVOLUTION IN SCHILLER'S CONCEPTION OF 
POETRY — NOT TO BE CARRIED OUT CONSISTENTLY — ' DIE KRANICHE ' 
— 'DERTAUCHER' — BALLADS OF SCHILLER AND GOETHE COMPARED 

— 'DIE GLOCKE' — LATER DRAMAS — ' WALLENSTEIN ' — ' DIE BRAUT 
VON MESSINA ' — CONTRASTED WITH ' CARLOS ' — THE ROMANTIC 
SCHOOL — ITS CHARACTERISTICS — CRITICISM : FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL 

— HIS INDIAN STUDIES — WILHELM SCHLEGEL — TRANSLATIONS : 
SHAKESPEARE — CALDERON — i DON QUIXOTE ' — ' LUCINDE ' — C ION ' 
AND ' ALARCOS' — TLECK — ' ZERBINO ' — ' GENOVEVA ' — ' OCTAVIANUS ' 
— THE ROMANTIC THEORY OF POETRY — NOVELS OF TIECK — POPULAR 
TALES — WERNER — ' DER VIERUNDZWANZIGSTE FEBRUAR ' — NOVALIS 
— RICHTER : HIS HUMOUR — KOTZEBUE — ACHIEVEMENT OF THE 
ROMANTIC SCHOOL — CONTRAST WITH SUCCEEDING WRITERS — PHILO- 
SOPHY : KANT — ' KRITLK DER REINEN VERNUNFT ' — IDEALIST 
ELEMENT — AGNOSTIC ELEMENT : ITS SIGNIFICANCE — ITS INCONSIST- 
ENCY WITH OTHER ELEMENTS OF HIS THEORY — DUE TO A SURVIVAL 
OF ALIEN IDEAS — ITS CONSEQUENCES NOT FULLY REALISED BY 
KANT — DUALISM OF HIS SPECULATIVE SYSTEM — HIS ETHICS — MORE 
CONSISTENTLY IDEALIST — HIS SIGNIFICANCE TO THE LIFE OF HIS 
TIME — HIS ESTHETIC THEORY — THE BEAUTIFUL — THE SUBLIME — 
GENERAL VALIDITY OF 2ESTHETIC JUDGMENTS — RELATION OF ART 
TO LIFE — SIGNIFICANCE OF KANT'S THEORY — SCHILLER — THE 
OBJECTIVE BASIS OF BEAUTY — ' .ESTHETISCHE ERZIEHUNG DES 
MENSCHEN' — ITS RELATION TO KANT AND TO 'DIE KUNSTLER ' — 
FICHTE : HIS ATTEMPT TO ESCAPE FROM KANT'S DUALISM — SIG- 
NIFICANCE OF HIS EARLIER AND LATER WRITINGS — SCHELLING — 
HEGEL — POLITICAL THEORY OF KANT — OF FICHTE — OF HEGEL — 
ESTHETIC THEORY — HEGEL — LITERARY MOVEMENT COMMON TO THE 
WHOLE RACE. 

The romantic revolt may, from one point of view, 
„ A . 7I be described as the liberation of the 

Fredericks at- 
tack on German Teutonic spirit from the tyranny of the 

" Latins " and, in particular, of the French. 

And nowhere is this more manifest than in Ger- 



168 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

many itself. In no country had the influence of 
France been stronger, in no country had it been 
more oppressive. The very language of the soil 
had, in fashionable society, been driven out by 
French. And it was in French that the greatest 
ruler of the age delivered what, when all abate- 
ments have been made, must still be called his 
attack upon the literature and language of his 
country (1780). 1 

Yet at the time when Frederick discharged his bat- 
teries against all things German, the yoke of France 
had already been shaken off. The thirty years' war 
of Lessing against the alien had, the year before, been 
victoriously crowned by the completion of Nathan; 
the most fruitful works of Herder, with one excep- 
tion, had already been published ; the author of Gotz 
and Werther had already written some of his loveliest 
lyrics and the greatest scenes of Faust. In the follow- 
ing year Europe was to be startled by the appearance 
of Kant's Kritih and the earliest Play of Schiller. 

To banish the tyranny of foreign thought and 
foreign forms, to restore to German literature the 

. # . , power of expressing the very mind and 

Assertion of r *■ ° J 

German in- heart of the German race — to vindicate 

the indefeasible right of each nation to 

its own life, of every poet to embody his own ideals 

in his own way — this was the common aim of all 

1 (Euvres de Frederic II (Berlin, 1789), t. iii. There is a violent 
outbreak against Gotz, and "the abominable pieces of Shakespeare." 
Almost the only German writer to be praised is Quant (sic) of 
Konigsberg, on account of his "harmonious" style, a quality of 
which readers of the Kritik will be incredulous. 



GERMANY. 169 

these writers, and it was among the most memorable 
of their achievements. That it was only a part of 
their work — and, in one sense, the smallest part of 
it — needs hardly to be said. Individuality is, after 
all, an abstract term ; its meaning varies with each 
individual to whom it is applied. Thus, in putting 
forth what lay in their own nature, these writers 
may at first sight seem to have done nothing more 
than is done by all writers in all ages of the world. 
Each of them, however, was in fact, and it would not 
be difficult to show that each of them was consciously, 
fighting for a like right in all the rest. And, what is 
more, each of them was fighting for the individuality 
of the German race as against the slavish worship of 
French thought and the slavish imitation of French 
forms and French conventions. Thus behind the 
claim, which every poet may be said implicitly to 
make, for the free development of his own genius, 
there lay a further claim for the free development 
of individuality in general ; and behind this again 
lay the assertion of German nationality against the 
foreigner. 

This, in itself, gives to the history of German 
literature at this period a significance which -is want- 
ing in other countries. In France, which had given 
the law to other lands, it was necessarily absent; 
while England, deeply as she had been influenced 
by France, had yet always retained her own in- 
dividuality. In Germany alone it was a struggle 
not only against rules, but against foreign rules ; not 
only for individual, but also for national, freedom. 



170 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

And it was a struggle waged against tremendous odds. 
In any other country, the leaders of such a movement 
Difficulties of could have appealed to a national sentiment 
the task. already in existence. In Germany there 
was no nation to appeal to. The very idea of the 
Fatherland had to be created. The Seven Years' 
War may have prepared men's minds for its ac- 
ceptance. But it was the tyranny of Napoleon and 
the war of Liberation which alone made it a reality. 
This, in itself, isolated the great writers of the 
period and multiplied the obstacles in their path. 
Nor to any great extent could they draw upon 
those sentiments, whether political or religious, 
which may exist quite independently of the national 
ideal. They did not, like Voltaire and Eousseau, 
appeal to an unspoken dissatisfaction with the estab- 
lished system of Church and State. They did not 
work hand in hand with a religious revival, such 
as that of the Methodists and Evangelicals. It 
is true that the Pietists and Moravians had done 
something to give shape to the floating mass of 
sentiment without which no intellectual, no spiritual, 
movement is likely to have wide or enduring results. 
It is true that we meet traces of their influence in 
many writers between 1740 and 1790 — even in one 
so little liable to such promptings as Goethe. But 
it is also true that the prevalent feeling of such 
men towards them was one of hostility; and that, 
as time went on, that hostility became more 
marked. 

The result of all this was that the great writers 



GERMANY. 171 

of Germany might almost be called aliens in their 
own land ; that, for good or for evil, they stood 
strangely aloof from the general life and interests 
of their time. At the height of the movement, they 
still remained something of a caste, — the caste of 
intellect, striving to guide their countrymen from 
above, little heeding the forces which worked around 
them or beneath. The course of Goethe's activity is 
a striking illustration of this in one direction. So 
is the character of Lessing's work and genius, in 
another. 

It is significant that the first great writer of 

modern Germany should, above all things, have 

been a critic. Creative power was Less- 

Lessing. t . 

ings in abundance. But never has crea- 
tive power been so completely under the control 
of critical genius ; never has poet worked with so 
clear a consciousness of the goal towards which he 
was striving, as the author of Emilia Galotti and 
Nathan der Weise. His very dramas were prompted 
by the deliberate design of reforming the German 
stage ; his greatest poem sprang out of his lifelong 
warfare with theological bigotry. This gives an unity 
of design to his whole work, such as belongs to that 
of no other writer. But at the same time it has 
served not a little to conceal his creative genius. 

The literary life of Lessing (1729-1781) naturally 
falls into three parts : the first (1746 - 1760), the 
period of the early dramas, of Miss Sara Sampson, 
of the Prose Fables and the Litteraturbriefe; the 
second (1760 to 1770), the period of Minna von 



172 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Barnhelm, of Laokoon, of the Hamburgische Dramat- 
urgic ; the third (1770 to 1781), the period of Emilia 
Galotti, of the Anti-Goeze, of Nathan der Weise. 

The first period is the period of apprenticeship. 
To it belongs most, if not all, of the poetry, other 

„ , ; than dramatic, written by Lessing. But 

Early work 7 J ° 

in 'poetry it is just here that his powers are seen 
at their slightest. Yet even here the 
prevailing tendency of his work is already to be 
discerned. He turns with something of contempt 
from both the schools which then divided Germany : 
from the sublimities of Klopstock no less than from 
the u mechanic art" of Gottsched and the French. 
He confines himself to the themes which, slight 
though they may be, most readily lend themselves 
to spontaneous, and therefore poetic, treatment ; the 
loves and hates and revelries, which came to him 
sanctioned by the traditions of Greece and Eome, 
and from which, at the close of the period, he 
naturally passed to a generous welcome of the war- 
songs written by his friend Gleim — formerly, like 
himself, the poet of love and wine— in praise of 
Frederick and the other heroes of Eossbach and 
Kiinersdorf. The most notable of these poems are 
probably the Epigrams; and, of the Epigrams, those 
directed against his literary enemies, against Gott- 
sched, Bodmer, Schonaich, Klopstock, and Voltaire. 

Of far other importance are the dramas which 
fall within these earlier years. With the exception 
of Miss Sara Sampson, they can hardly be said to 
break absolutely new ground. They still betray the 



GERMANY. 173 

overruling influence, and retain many of the typical 
figures, of the Comedy of France. But the most 
successful of them, Der Junge Gelehrte (1747-48) and 
Der Freigeist (1749), already show that mastery of 
dialogue which Lessing was to perfect in Minna and 
Emilia Galotti ; they already show that rigid economy, 
that iron grip, of style which distinguishes him from 
all the writers of his country ; and, above all, they are 
drawn straight from the personal experience, the most 
intimate convictions, of the author. The young pedant 
of the former comedy, the free-thinker of the latter, are 
both satiric studies of Lessing himself; or rather of 
what Lessing himself might readily have become, if 
his clear sight and strong will would have allowed him. 
It was by painting his own heart that he learned 
to paint that of his age and country. Der Junge 
Gelehrte and Der Freigeist are the first steps on the 
road which was to lead to Minna von Barnhelm 
and Emilia Galotti. 

A more decided step on the same road is marked 
by Miss Sara Sampson (1755). In itself, this play 
Miss Sara is doubtless far inferior to those already 
Sampson. men tioned. Of all his works it is the 
one in which the true Lessing is most difficult to 
recognise. The construction is poor, the characters 
coarsely drawn, the sentiment grossly overcharged. 
But it breaks fresh ground ; it proclaims the final 
breach of Lessing with the classical traditions of the 
French. The very description of it, a " tragedy of 
common life," was a challenge to the classical con- 
vention which had decreed that, if the counting-house 



174 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

and the parlour were the home of Comedy, Tragedy 
was to be sought only in the throne-room — or, as 
Voltaire was bold enough to add, in the family vault 
— of princes. 

In breaking through this convention, Lessing 
avowedly followed in the steps of Lillo. 1 The in- 
Lessingand cidents of his play, together with some of 
Diderot. £he names, were clearly suggested by Clar- 
issa. The stream of English influence, which was to 
count so largely in the revival of the next fifty years, 
had already begun to flow ; and Lessing, always alive 
to new currents of thought and imagination, was 
among the first to take advantage of it. He may, to 
some extent, have been anticipated by Gellert in his 
own country ; but he had the far higher honour of fore- 
stalling Diderot across the border. Le Fils Naturel 
and Le Pere de Famille, with the discourses on 
Dramatic Poetry attached to them, belong respect- 
ively to 1757 and 1758; while Lessing's Essay on 
Sentimental Comedy was published in 1754; and 
the Play which put a like theory into practice in 
the field of Tragedy had its first performance, as we 
have seen, in 1755. Lessing, however, was always 
forward to acknowledge the originality of Diderot, 
"the most philosophical of all critics since Aris- 
totle " ; and a translation of the great Frenchman's 
two Plays and Discourses was issued by him in 
1760. 

The conception of Miss Sara Sampson is far better 
than its execution. This is the last thing that could 

1 George Barnwell, 1731, 



GERMANY. 175 

be said of the author's next dramatic venture of 
Minna von importance. In Minna von Barnhelm 
Bamheim. (1763-67) Lessing sprang at one bound 
to the full height of his powers. His two later 
pieces may have aimed at more ; but neither of 
them surpasses, one of them certainly does not equal, 
it in dramatic genius. Here he turns from the 
Tragedy of common life to what, in his mind as in 
Diderot's, was the kindred field of serious Comedy. 
The besetting sin of such Comedy is to lay itself 
out for a ceaseless flow of tears. To this danger 
Lessing, no less as dramatist than as critic, was 
keenly alive. And nothing in Minna is more 
remarkable than the unfailing instinct which pre- 
serves him from yielding to it. The one scene 
which must, if presented to the eye, have out- 
stepped the bounds of comedy — the scene in which 
Minna believes herself to be forsaken by her lover 
— is, for this reason, merely a reported scene; and, 
still further to break its moving force, the report 
is made by the one person who stands entirely 
outside the emotional interest of the play. This, 
however, is merely a negative device. The salt of 
the piece lies in its abounding humour; not the 
superficial humour which depends on incident, but 
the far nobler and richer humour which flows from 
the deepest springs of character. The whole action 
of the play is dominated by Minna; and in her 
resolute control of circumstance, in the zest with 
which she " reads her lesson " to the quixotic Major, 
she is perhaps the one heroine of modern Comedy 



176 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

who is not unworthy to take place beside the women 
of Shakespeare. 

Among the great qualities of the play, this is doubt- 
less the greatest and the most abiding. But it has a 
further importance, as the earliest drama drawn from 
a purely national source. In the Litter aturbriefe, 
Lessing had assailed Gottsched for imposing French 
fashions upon the German stage. In preferring the 
English dramatists, he had assigned the specific ground 
that their way of thought was far more in accord with 
the genius of the German race than that of the 
French ; and, after quoting a fragment from the old 
popular Faust, he had ended with a prayer "for a 
German Play composed solely of such scenes as this." 
In the widest sense — a sense certainly less literal 
than he would have given to the words at the 
moment — Minna von Barnhelm was the answer to 
that prayer. It paints the inmost heart and ideals of 
the nation — its fidelity, its honour, and perhaps some- 
thing more than its humour. More than this, it is 
cut from the very quick of the popular movement of 
the time; it is born of the hopes and fears, of the 
misery and heroism, of the war which first wakened 
Germany to a faint consciousness that she too was 
a nation. In this connection Goethe, who cannot be 
suspected of laying too great a stress on either the 
patriotic or the moral bearings of imaginative art, 
was the first to recognise its importance. 

Five years after the performance of Minna, Emilia 
Galotti was produced at Brunswick (1772). The first 
conception of the play dates from 1758, or even 



GERMANY. 177 

earlier. And it is probable that in the interval the 
Emma design had been more or less completely 
Gaiotti. recast. It was as "a Virginia of com- 
mon life " that Lessing first thought of his heroine ; 
and that is hardly a description that could be 
applied to her in the finished work. It is only 
by courtesy that Emilia can be called " a domestic 
tragedy " ; in reality it is as far removed from any 
such partial and limited interest as it is possible for 
a tragedy to be. It embodies the pure, we might 
almost say the abstract, ideal of Tragedy which Less- 
ing had worked out for himself, not without involun- 
tary aid from Voltaire and Corneille, in the Hamburg- 
ische Dramaturgic. And it owes as little to the 
conditions of time, or place, or class, as Iphigenie 
or Hamlet. It is, in fact, a Greek tragedy in modern 
dress. The characters, the surroundings, belong to 
Lessing's own age ; but the method which selects and 
orders them is that of Sophocles ; or, as Lessing him- 
self might have preferred to say, of Aristotle. The 
portraiture is more detailed, the incidents more roman- 
tic, than in the classical drama. But in simplicity, 
in compression, in closely knit dependence of action 
on character, Emilia is of all modern plays that which 
is most closely modelled on the Greek. Starting 
from the theme given in the story of Virginia, Lessing 
has deliberately stripped it of all save its purely 
human interest. The political motive, which was of 
the essence of the story in its original shape, is re- 
jected from the first. The problem he set himself 
was this. Given that a father slays his daughter, 

M 



178 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

what characters and what circumstances are necessary 
to account for such a deed ? The characters of the 
seducer and his accomplice left little room for hesi- 
tation ; though the skill with which each is lifted 
above the conventionality almost inseparable from 
the part cannot sufficiently be admired. The real 
knot of the situation lay in the conception of the 
father and daughter. The father, austere and sus- 
picious towards the outside world, jealously watchful 
over his own kin ; the daughter, easily cowed by the 
first shock of danger, immovably resolute directly 
time has been given her to collect herself — " at once 
the most timid and the most determined of woman- 
kind," — such are the characters whom the reckless 
selfishness of the Prince threatens with dishonour. 
And they are just the characters from which, when 
driven to despair, desperate deeds are to be expected. 
Yet, even so, Odoardo does not nerve himself to strike 
the blow until the cast-off mistress of the Prince, her- 
self a triumph of dramatic portraiture, has goaded 
him to fury; until the craft of the Prince's pander 
has cut off all hope of Emilia's escape ; until Emilia 
herself implores him to take her life as the only safe- 
guard against shame. If any motive could prompt 
to so terrible a deed, if any circumstances could recon- 
cile us to it, they must surely be such as these. 

Emilia was a reversion, though a reversion such 

as only genius could make, to the stricter form of 

classical drama. In his next and last 

Nathan. 

play, Lessmg broke through all recog- 
nised forms and struck into a path where there 



GERMANY. 179 

was no precedent to guide him. Nathan der Weise 
(1778-79) is a drama only in appearance; in sub- 
stance it is a lyric plea for the equal rights of all 
faiths before God. The characters, such as they are, 
are firmly drawn ; but they are not, and are not in- 
tended to be, more than sketches. The action, if 
action it can be called, does not begin until the play 
is more than half over; and, when it does begin, tends 
rather to baffle our sympathies than to satisfy them. 
It is not by its dramatic qualities that Nathan appeals 
to our imagination, but by its exalted passion and by 
the noble spirit of faith and tolerance which inspires 
it. The very metrical form of the poem reflects the 
nobility of its temper. The blank verse, which 
Lessing was the first writer to employ in German for 
dramatic purposes, moves with a sustained dignity 
and yet with a freedom which are nothing less than 
surprising. And, though Goethe doubtless carried the 
metre to yet greater perfection, it is questionable 
whether Schiller surpassed, or even equalled, Lessing 
in the effects which he drew from it. 

And yet this poem, so full of calm, was in its 

origin no more than an occasional piece, the offspring 

of a theological dispute. In 1774, moved 

Its occasion. »•••*• 

by his taith in the virtue of free dis- 
cussion, Lessing had begun to issue the famous Wolf- 
enbilttel Fragments. These were, in reality, extracts 
from the unpublished work of a liberal divine, 
Eeimarus, who had become known to Lessing during 
his residence at Hamburg. But, by a questionable 
deception, the editor put them forth as fragments of 



180 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

a manuscript under his official care in tlie Library 
at Wolfenbiittel (1774-78). They contained an attack 
— sometimes, it must be admitted, in the crudest 
vein — upon the received doctrines of Christianity ; in 
particular, upon the motives of Christ and his disciples. 
The fury of the theologians was at once aroused. 
And Lessing, who had been careful to dissociate him- 
self from the attack (which, indeed, in no way assorted 
with his cautious and essentially religious temper), 
was violently mishandled. To this controversy be- 
longs the Anti-Goeze, the general name commonly 
given to a whole series of pamphlets directed against 
his chief antagonist ; and, more indirectly, Die Erzie- 
hung des Menschengeschlechts (1780), which has an 
important place in the development of the Phil- 
osophy of History. All these, together with much 
else of his work, stand in connection with the purely 
scientific and scholarly side of Lessing's genius, and 
therefore do not fall to be considered in this place. 
What does concern us, however, is the extraordinary 
serenity of the man who, from these turbid waters, 
could distil so pure a spring of poetry and humanity 
as that which flows in Nathan. The central idea of 
the poem has, no doubt, much in common with that 
familiar to us in Voltaire and other writers of the 
time. But neither Voltaire, nor indeed Boccaccio, 
from whom the famous fable of the three rings is 
adapted, can compare with Lessing in depth or nobil- 
ity of thought. The tolerance of Voltaire, and for 
that matter of Boccaccio also, has an edge of scepticism 
which is entirely absent from that of Lessing. To the 



GERMANY. 181 

former, at any rate, " all religions/' it may not unfairly 
be said, " are equally false." It was the deepest con- 
viction of Lessing that, in the eyes of God, they are, 
in the fullest sense, all equally true. Thus in this, 
as in its more distinctly literary aspects, the crowning 
work of Lessing' s life breaks through the traditions 
of the eighteenth century, and anticipates the wider 
outlook of the age which was to follow. 

Yet it is neither as poet, nor even as dramatist, 
that Lessing is now chiefly remembered. His most 

Lessing as fruitful work lay in criticism. His critical 

critic writings cover the whole period of his life. 

The most important of them are the Litteraturbriefe 
(1759-1765); the Essay on the Fable, attached to 
his own Prose Fables (1759); finally, in the very 
maturity of his genius, Laokoon, published in 1766 ; 
and the Hamburgische Dramaturgic (1767-69). 

As a critic, Lessing stands absolutely by himself. 
He has not the genius for throwing new ideas broad- 
cast into the field of literary thought, which was 
possessed by Herder or by Diderot. He has not 
the talent for tracking remote affinities of imagina- 
tive temper, which was the secret of Sainte-Beuve. 
He has not the power of identifying himself with 
the genius of a particular poet or poetic master- 
piece, which was so strong in Lamb or Pater. It 
might perhaps be said that he lacks the subtler 
and more delicate qualities of the critical temper. 
It is certainly true that they count for less than 
some other qualities in the general sum of his 
work. No reader of the Dramaturgic, for instance, 



182 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

can have failed to observe how small a space is 
devoted to questions of style; though, on the rare 
occasions when such matters are handled, as in the 
discussion of what the actor can accomplish by 
delivery and gesture, Lessing shows a penetration 
not unworthy of Lamb himself. It is rather in the 
broader aspects of critical inquiry that Lessing is 
pre - eminent. In defining the functions of the 
different Arts, or the various branches into which 
each of them, and in particular Poetry, severally 
falls ; in laying down the boundaries which they 
cannot legitimately pass ; in striking his finger upon 
the exact error which lessens or destroys the value 
of a given imaginative work, and in tracing that 
error to its cause, — in all this he has, among 
modern critics, no equal and no second. And 
what is the secret of this power ? It sprang from 
two sources — the surprising range of his knowledge, 
and his genius for analysis. 

Lessing was probably the most learned man of his 
day. Theology, philosophy, literary history, antiqui- 
ties, and art — all fell within his net. And, 

His learning. . 

bating the first, all contributed something 
vital to his equipment as critic. Of literary history 
in particular he had a mastery which has seldom, if 
ever, been approached. With the literature of his 
own country, mediaeval as well as modern, the evi- 
dence tends to show that he was more conversant 
than any of his contemporaries or forerunners ; while 
Greek and Eoman literature, English, French, Italian, 
and even Spanish, were scarcely less familiar. "In 



GEKMANY. 183 

comparison with his enormous culture/' said Goethe 
with reference to Emilia Galotti, " we seem to have 
lapsed again into barbarism." Had this been written 
of his literary knowledge, it would have been still 
more obviously true. 

This " enormous " knowledge did him double ser- 
vice. It gave him a standard of comparison wider 
than that within the reach of any previous — we 
might almost add, of any subsequent — critic. And, 
in discussing the nature and limits of the various 
arts, or literary species, it supplied him with a mass 
of material the value of which can hardly be over- 
rated. As his chief triumphs were won in this 
field, the importance of the latter point is excep- 
tionally great. 

Knowledge, however, would have availed nothing 
if there had not been the keenest judgment to in- 
ms gemus terpret it. And Lessing's judgment, as 
M analysis. k as ^en g^^ consisted first and fore- 
most in a genius for analysis. It is in analysis, in 
the power of detecting the principle which under- 
lies a given group of imaginative creations, of 
resolving that principle into its component ele- 
ments, and of grasping the consequences which each 
of these must logically involve, that his supreme 
power indisputably lies. In this sense, it might 
be far more truly said of him than of Diderot, 
that, of all critics since Aristotle, he is the most 
philosophical. His Essay on the Fable, his defini- 
tion of the bounds which separate poetry from 
painting and sculpture in Laokoon, his determina- 



184 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tion of the functions and methods of tragedy in 
the Dramaturgic, offer the nearest modern approach 
to the unfaltering method of the Poetics — "a work/' 
he writes, "which I do not hesitate to avow that 
I consider as infallible as the Elements of Euclid." 1 

It is impossible here to examine any or all of 
these in detail. All that can be attempted is to 
indicate their general point of view. 

Lessing has been described as an "emancipated 
classic." And no phrase could mark out more ex- 
_. _.„ , actly his position as a critic. If by 

His relation to J r ^ 

t types "classicism" be understood the conven- 
tions proclaimed by Boileau and other 
legislators of the Augustan Parnassus, then Lessing 
had entirely emancipated himself from its sway. 
In his own dramas he may observe the unity 
of time. But that is the only trace of orthodox 
classicism to be found in them; and the most con- 
vincing pages of the Dramaturgic are those which 
destroy the pretensions of the "classical" autocracy. 
On the other hand, for the classicism of Koman, and 
still more of Greek, art, for the classicism which 
means simplicity of conception and severe economy 
of style, he had an unwavering admiration. His 
own tragedy, as we have seen, was built closely 
upon the classical model. And, despite his reverence 
for Shakespeare, it is by the classical and not by 
the Shakespearean canons that he tests the master- 
pieces of the French stage, and finds them wanting. 
Indeed, it is not so much what distinguishes Shake- 

1 Hamb. Dram., §§ 101-4. 



GERMANY. 185 

speare from the Greek dramatists, as what he has 
in common with them, that commands his admira- 
tion. And, conversely, it is not what Voltaire and 
Corneille have in common with Sophocles and 
Euripides, but that in which they depart from them, 
that he covers with contempt. In other words, it 
is precisely the romantic element in their plays 
with which he quarrels. 

The same tendency appears in his criticism of 
La Fontaine. The French poet had attempted to 
clothe the bare skeleton of the iEsopian Fable; he 
had endeavoured to convert it from a moral symbol 
into a self-contained drama. And it is just this 
which Lessing condemns. The Fables of La Fon- 
taine, in his view, fail because they lack simplicity ; 
because they remove the landmarks which the sure 
instinct of the ancients had set up; in one word, 
because they betray, however slightly, the work- 
ing of the romantic leaven. Had he reflected that 
the same criticism would apply yet more destruct- 
ively to Chaucer? 

But there is no need to multiply instances. The 

very design of Laokoon is enough to prove Lessing's 

leaning towards the classical ideal. The 

Laokoon. 

Greeks and Eomans, he urges, habitually 
observed the limits which are imposed by the primary 
conditions of the respective arts. Modern artists 
habitually confound them; and herein lies their in- 
feriority. Much of what he says on this head is pro- 
foundly true. And in an age when the painter sought 
nothing better than to tell a story, and the poet 



186 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

nothing better than to paint a picture, and when the 
critics applauded them to the echo, the protest was 
well timed ; and it bore fruit. But it is impossible 
to forget that much of the greatest poetry of the 
romantic period — much of Keats and Shelley, for in- 
stance, of Schiller and of Hugo — is great just because 
it is, in the strictest sense, picturesque; and that, 
speaking generally, the mission of the Eomantics 
was largely to overthrow the boundaries between 
art and art, between one literary species and 
another, which Lessing had laboured to set up. 

This is only to say that Lessing had the defects of 
his qualities. His eye was so firmly set on differences 
Limitations of that he was apt to lose sight of affinities. 
his views. j n kj g thi^ f or analysis he was apt to over- 
look the bond which unites all the arts, or the various 
branches of each, and enables each in turn, doubtless 
with many restrictions, to borrow from the others. 
Because there are certain forms imposed on each by 
the conditions under which it works, he was ready to 
regard these as absolutely rigid types, incapable of 
change, beyond the reach of progress, each destined to 
retain for ever the shape which had been given it by 
the ancients. Much, for instance, of the Dramaturgie 
is devoted to showing that the true classicism is to 
be found, not in the French dramatists, but in Shake- 
speare. In a sense this is not to be disputed. But it 
is only half the truth. And of the deep gulf which 
separates the Elizabethan from the Athenian drama 
he seems to have taken little count. Certainly, he is 
far more concerned to prove Shakespeare in agree- 



GERMANY. 187 

ment with the spirit of Greek Tragedy than to admit 
the significance of his departure from its form. 

In all this he is the mirror of his time. In 
particular there is the closest analogy between his 
Lessingand work, as critic, and that of Kant, as 
Kant, philosopher. Both alike set themselves 

to resolve their particular matter — the process of 
sensible experience in the one case, the world of 
imagination in the other — into its elements. Both 
alike tend to obscure the fundamental unity which 
underlies the " manifold of experience," whether 
intellectual or imaginative, and without which 
diversity itself becomes inconceivable. Neither of 
them realises the significance of the idea of pro- 
gress. Both alike, therefore, are analytic rather than 
synthetic — " critical," to use Kant's own term, rather 
than creative — in their temper and achievement. 
But both alike admit into their system elements 
which are hardly compatible with its general tenour. 
And, thanks to this very inconsistency, both alike 
stand at the parting of the ways, and can claim not 
only to have summed up the period which was 
drawing to its close, but also to have pointed the 
way to that which was to follow. And so it was upon 
the foundation they had laid that the philosophers 
and critics of the next generation were fain to build. 
As Mchte and Hegel would have been impossible 
without Kant, so Herder and Goethe would not have 
been what they were had they not followed upon 
Lessing. 

A touch of romance upon a groundwork of classi- 



188 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

cism — that is the seal of Lessing's work, alike in 
criticism and in creation. In the latter, no doubt, 
particularly in his dramas, the breath of romance is 
more perceptible than in the former. It makes itself 
felt in the rich humour of Minna ; it makes itself felt 
still more in the glowing colours of Emilia, in the 
eastern atmosphere, the passionate pleadings, the deep 
religious faith of Nathan. Yet, even here, the classi- 
cal influence pierces at every point. And Nathan, in 
particular, could only have been written by one who 
had steeped himself in the thought and sentiment of 
the great humanists, Voltaire at their head, who stood 
for the classical tradition in the general movement of 
their time. 

With Lessing a whole age, the age of transition 

and preparation, may be said to end. And before 

going further, it is well to pause and 

The 7ieiv period. , . . 

consider the main currents ol imagina- 
tive thought and feeling as they ran at the moment 
when the new period begins (circ. 1775), and as, 
with easily intelligible modifications, they continued 
to run during the thirty years which followed. 

The Augustans of pure blood may be reckoned to 
have died with Gottsched (1700-66), slain by the 
The Enlighten- merciless ridicule of Lessing. The nearest 
™nt. approach to their position was held by 

the champions of the Enlightenment, at whose head 
stood Nicolai (1733-1811), the standard-bearer of 
Voltaire, the friend — though not, in any but the 
most superficial sense, the disciple — of Lessing, the 



GERMANY. 189 

stubborn opponent of all that, in his narrow view, 
ran athwart the line of liberal advance mapped out 
by the Encyclopedists, and, for that reason among 
others, the declared enemy alike of the Hellenic 
revival and of the romantic revolt. For the next 
thirty years his journal, the Allgemeine deutsche 
Bibliothek, 1 was the organ of the "enlightened" 
opposition. And at moments — for instance, in his 
crusade against Kant — he was joined by Herder 
and by others who might have found it equally 
hard to justify their presence " in that galley." 

In marked hostility to Nicolai and his squadron 
stood the veterans, the old guard, of Eomance. 
TKeMedicevai- Bodmer (1698-1783) and Haller (1708- 
ists. 1777) were, indeed, at the end of their 

labours. But their place was much more than filled 
by Klopstock (1724-1803). The strain of pure senti- 
ment, the strain of description, even the biblical 
strain which played so large a part in his own earlier 
work, now fell into the background. And the later 
productions of Klopstock, his odes and dramas, 2 give 
voice to the love of country, to the great memories 
of the national past, which the Seven Years' War 
had awakened in Germany, and which, in one form 
or another, inspired much of what was most fruitful 
in the romantic movement. It is to the tradition 
thus founded that the leading figures of the open- 

1 Founded in 1766, continued till 1806. 

2 Der Messias, begun 1748, was completed in 1773. The Odes were 
collected in 1770. The dramas (Bardiete), a trilogy on Hermann, 
appeared respectively in 1769, 1784, and 1789, 



190 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ing years of our period attach themselves : Burger, 
Herder, and the Goethe of Gotz. Among the lesser 
lights who, in the main, followed the same tradition 
are the Stolbergs, Boie and, above all, Voss, the 
only one who maintained it without wavering to 
the end. 

In close connection with this, the first line of the 
romantic advance, but easily to be separated from it, 
sturm und is the small band of men who, caring little 
Drang. f or na ti ona l traditions and thinking lightly 
of national demarcations, were stirred to the depth 
of their soul by contempt for the existing order of 
society, by a passion for humanity, by faith in the 
ideals of Eousseau. Of these by far the greatest, as 
by far the most sincere, was Schiller ; the Schiller 
of Die Rauber and Don Carlos, of Die Kilnstler and 
the lines to Eousseau. But Herder, in some moods, 
betrays a touch of the same temper. So, in a less 
degree, does the author of Werther. Among the 
minor writers, Klinger and the other votaries of 
Sturm und Drang 1 have some affinities with it. 
So again, though in a very different way — with an 
infinitely keener sense of form and colour, and 
with an ideal artistic rather than humanitarian — 
has Heinse, the author of Ardinghello (1785). 2 

1 This absurd play by Klinger (1775) has given its name to the 
whole period of ferment associated with the appearance of Werther. 

2 See the curious description of the ideal community founded 
by Ardiughello and his friends. Their worship consisted of songs 
translated from " Job, The Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes, Homer, 
Plato, and the choruses of the Greek Tragedians." — Heinse, WerTce 
(Leipzig, 1902), t. iv. p. 391. 



GERMANY. 191 

Lastly, and separated by a whole world of thought 
and feeling from both the preceding groups, come 
Romantic the later romanticists, the romanticists 
school. without fear and without remorse; Tieck, 
for instance, and Novalis and the Schlegels. What 
distinguishes these writers from others of their time 
is their absorption in form, their indifference to the 
wider issues of thought and imagination. At a 
certain stage of their history, no doubt, they were 
led into alliance with the nationalists on the one 
hand and the Catholics upon the other. Several of 
them, indeed, passed over formally into the Catholic 
camp. But neither in politics nor in religion had 
conviction, such conviction as commonly moves men, 
much to say in the matter. A vague leaning towards 
mediaevalism in the sphere of poetry, a vague con- 
tempt for the current commonplaces in religion and 
politics, held in their minds the place that, with 
most men, is taken either by reasoned faith or by 
blind prejudice. To this cause must be traced the 
sense of bewilderment which their proceedings aroused 
in the minds of their fellow-countrymen ; the resent- 
ment, as at a prolonged mystification, to which Voss 
gave utterance from the one side, and Goethe from 
the other. The charge of deliberate deception is, of 
course, not to be sustained. The romanticists, in 
fact, paid the penalty which is commonly paid by 
those who are out of sympathy at once with the 
general life of their country and with the main body 
of its intellectual leaders. And, however poorly we 
may think of their actual achievement, it must 



192 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

always be remembered that they stood, in a very 
special sense and to a degree more marked than 
even Goethe and Schiller, for that absolute freedom 
of inquiry and that practice of bold experiment 
which lie very near to the heart of any great intel- 
lectual or imaginative movement. Hence, perhaps, 
the mutual attraction between them and two at 
least of the boldest thinkers of the time, Fichte 
and Schelling. 

We pass at once to the opposite pole, the revival 

of Hellenism. The earliest representative of this, 

and the purest, is Winckelmann ; and 

Htill&ybi/STfi 

what needs to be said on the subject is 
best reserved until a following page. It must suffice 
here to point out that for five -and -twenty years 
(1780-1805) Hellenism was among the dominant in- 
fluences in German literature ; that it took possession 
of Schiller and inspired some of the noblest work of 
Goethe. 

From all these groups one figure stands markedly 
apart. This is Wieland, who through a long life 
(1733-1813) probably maintained a popu- 
larity more unbroken than any of his con- 
temporaries. Starting as the ardent disciple of 
Bodmer and Klopstock, he soon struck into a lighter 
and more natural vein. The transition is marked by 
his prose romance, Agathon (1766-67) ; the completion 
of it by his verse tale, Musarion (1768). In both, 
the setting is taken from the life of ancient Greece ; 
and Musarion betrays a reversion to Augustan in- 
fluences, notably that of Voltaire. On these grounds, 



GERMANY. 193 

as well as on that of his alleged frivolity, Wieland 
was denounced as the " murderer of innocence " and 
traitor to the romantic cause which he had begun 
by supporting. The breach was naturally not healed 
by his classical Singspiel, Alceste, nor by Die Wahl 
des Hercules (both in 1773). A few years later, how- 
ever, he returned in some measure to his former 
allegiance. And the remainder of his poetic activity 
was spent on a series of romantic tales in verse, 
drawn partly from oriental, partly from mediaeval, 
sources. To the former class belong Das Winter- 
marchen (the Fisherman and the Djinn of the Arabian 
Nights), and Gandalin (both in 1776) ; to the latter 
Oberon, the best known of all his works (1780). 
Here, adopting an irregular eight-lined stanza singu- 
larly well suited to his purpose, he tells the tale of 
Huon of Bordeaux, skilfully interweaving suggestions 
from Chaucer ( The Merchant's Tale) and Shakespeare 
{Midsummer Night's Dream). The cruder incidents 
of the old romance are softened or omitted; the 
characters and motives are boldly, but not obtrusively, 
modernised ; and a light air of irony is spread over 
the whole piece. In spirit and workmanship it offers 
a marked contrast to the efforts of the later roman- 
ticists in the same field. But there is something of 
ingratitude in the bitter contempt with which they 
habitually spoke of the author, who in Oberon pro- 
duced what probably still remains the best narrative 
poem of any length in the language. His fame has 
inevitably been eclipsed by that of Goethe and Schiller. 
But it is unjust to forget that he was among the first 

N 



194 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

to give grace to his native language; that Shake- 
speare was first naturalised in Germany by his trans- 
lation ; that both the Hellenic and the romantic 
revival stood deeply in his debt; and that Alceste 
prepared the way not only for the Singspiele, but for 
the Iphigenie, of Goethe. 

From 1772 onwards Wieland lived at Weimar, in 

the first instance as tutor to the young Duke. And 

nothing could be more honourable to him 

JVC iTflCL T 

than his entire freedom from jealousy of 
Goethe, who followed him thither in 1775. For the 
next thirty years Weimar, which in England would 
have been no more than a market town, was the in- 
tellectual capital of Germany. Goethe was virtually 
Prime Minister of the diminutive duchy; Herder 
was its chief pastor and, in fact though not in name, 
its minister of education; Wieland, and eventually 
Schiller, lived in or near the capital ; at Jena, sixteen 
miles away, were Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel ; while 
the Schlegels hovered between the little town and 
the famous University. Never, in all probability, has 
so much talent been gathered in an area so small 
and so thinly peopled. 

In close connection — to some extent, in antagon- 
ism l — with Lessing stand two critics, one of them a 
few years older, the other a few years younger, than 

1 Winckelmann, after reading Laokoon, scoffs at Lessing as "an 
University wit, who wishes to show off in paradoxes." " This man," 
he writes, " has so little knowledge that no answer would do him any- 
good." Brief e an einen seiner vertrautesten Freunde, April 18, 1767, 
For Herder's attitude, see below, pp. 207-9, 



GERMANY. 195 

himself: Winckelmann and Herder. Both had the 
strongest influence, an influence even stronger than 
that of Lessing, upon the subsequent development of 
German literature. Both, though in very different 
directions, did much to mould the mind and temper 
of Goethe. The former represents the classical, the 
latter the romantic, element in the genius of Germany 
and her greatest poet. 

Winckelmann (1717 - 1768) is one of the most 

striking figures in the literary history of the time. 

Severely limiting himself to the study of 

Winckelmann. ... -to 

Greek sculpture and antiquities — indif- 
ferent, as his conversion shows, to all that lay 
beyond — he drew from his own intellectual interest 
a fulness of passionate life which Eousseau and 
Goethe alone among the writers of their century 
can be said to have approached. This is reflected 
in the glow of enthusiasm which marks the style 
of his published work. It is seen still more clearly 
in the record of ardent friendships presented by 
his letters. In recovering the world of Greek art 
for modern use, he was at once pioneer and con- 
queror. Before his time it was to all intents and 
purposes an unknown land. When he died, he had 
laid the foundation of that technical study which 
has done so much for our own day ; and, what is 
far more important, he had kindled a love of the 
Greek ideal and an understanding reverence for the 
Greek spirit, which was to exercise the profoundest 
influence upon the great day of German literature 
and thought. This is the more memorable when we 



196 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

consider that of the purest age of Greek sculpture he 
knew little or nothing. All his knowledge — or, to 
speak more truly, all his divination — was drawn from 
works of the Grseco - Eoman period, on which the 
modern eye is taught to look with " a severe regard of 
control." But to his intuitive sympathy this was as 
little of an obstacle as Lempriere's Dictionary and 
vases of doubtful antiquity were to Keats. It was in 
Borne, or rather in the ideal Greece he built out of 
Rome, that he found his spiritual country ; and it was 
on his return thither, after a fleeting visit to the north, 
that his work was cut short by murder. His most 
important works are Gedanken ilber die Nachahmung 
der alten Kunstwerke 1 (1755), Geschichte der Kunsi des 
Alterthums (1764), and Monumenti Antichi Inediti, a 
collection of Plates with an introductory essay in 
Italian (1767). 

The immediate object of Winckelmann, in his suc- 
cessive writings, is to insist on the unrivalled perfec- 
tion of Greek art, and the necessity which 

His aims. . 

lies on the moderns of following its methods. 
" The only way for us," he writes, " to attain greatness, 
nay, to become inimitable, is to imitate the ancients, 
in particular the Greeks." But he was not the man 
to content himself with generalities. The greatness 
of Greek art, as he defined the matter, lies in the 
genius with which it fuses the ideal and the natural ; 
or, to put the same thing another way, in the spirit of 
calm which never ceases to assert itself, even when 
the passions represented are most intense. "The 

1 A continuation of this (Erlaiiterungen) was published in 1756. 



GERMANY. 197 

best critics," he declares, " find in the Greek master- 
pieces not only nature at her fairest, but something 
more than nature — certain ideal beauties which, be- 
longing to nature, have yet been conceived purely in 
the soul of the artist." "The artist (of the Apollo 
Belvedere) has based his work purely on the ideal; 
from the world of matter he has taken only so much 
as was necessary to give visible form to his design." l 
" The distinguishing mark of the Greek masterpieces," 
he defines still further, " is nobility of form, a certain 
greatness and peacefulness, alike in pose and ex- 
pression. The calmer the attitude of the body, the 
better adapted is it to render the true nature of the 
soul." 2 And in his later years he set himself with 
more and more accuracy to define the means by which 
this ideal effect, this balance between the material and 
the spiritual, between the individual and the general, 
between calm and passion, was actually attained. " I 
now go about," he writes in 1758, " with level and 
compass, measuring the ancient statues ; and am 
sorry that I have not before now bestirred myself 
more seriously over this inquiry, which I find full of 

1 It is significant that the passage, as at first written, was without 
this sentence. 

2 Thus of Michael Angelo he came to think harshly : " he built the 
bridge to the present corruption of taste." It is worth mentioning 
that the former of the two sentences in the text gave the occasion 
to Laokoon. Laokoon, in fact, opens with the citation of a passage 
which occurs a few pages earlier in Winckelmann's Nachahmung ; 
" Laokoon leidet, aber er leidet wie des Sophocles Philoktet." This, 
Lessing strives to prove, is exactly what he does not ; and the differ- 
ence, he urges, is due to the difference of the instruments with which 
the sculptor and the poet respectively were working. 



198 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

enlightenment." The results appear in the two latest 
of his great works. 

The affinity of all this with the work of Lessing is 
obvious. So also is the difference. Of the ideal 
His relation element in art, of the calm which he 
to Lessing. seems to identify with it, he has a far 
deeper sense than his contemporary — the one repre- 
senting the Aristotelian, the other the Platonic, 
tradition in this matter. 1 Again, the generalisa- 
tions which he draws from his subject are less 
abstract, and therefore more flexible — they are more 
of generalisations and less of fixed rules — than 
those of Lessing. To the hard saying — "The true 
critic draws no rules from his taste, but has formed 
his taste according to the rules demanded by the 
nature of the case" 2 — he would never have sub- 
scribed. Lastly, he makes no attempt to distinguish 
the limits and methods of one imaginative art from 
another. This may be due to the more limited scope 
of his subject. But, even apart from this, it may be 
doubted whether such a task would have accorded 
either with his temper or his convictions. What is 
true for one art, he seems to have felt, is, broadly 
speaking, true for all. 

1 "For some time past," he writes in 17.57, " I have spoken to 
hardly anyone except my old friend, Plato" — "the divine Plato," 
as he calls him in another letter. "I have renewed the acquaint- 
ance partly with a view to my book" (i.e., Geschichte der Kunst 
des Alterthums). 

2 Dramaturgic, Article xix. It is true that this is qualified in 
other passages — e.g., Article xxi., in connection with Voltaire's 
Nanine. 



GERMANY. 199 

Apart from detail, there are three services which 

Winckelmann rendered to the thought and the vital 

experience of his day. He was the first 

His influence. . . » •!»••*• 

critic to see the full significance of pro- 
portion, as the guiding principle of Greek sculp- 
ture, and to define it by generalisations built upon 
an accurate measurement of the best statues then 
accessible. By so doing, he laid the foundation 
of the technical study of the subject. He was 
the first to recognise that, however much it may 
have drawn from nature, and however faithful it 
may have been to nature, Greek art, when true to 
itself, always strove to interpret and to spiritualise 
nature. In this sense, he may justly be said to 
have revealed that which is the fundamental secret 
not only of Greek art, but of all art that aspires to the 
same perfection ; the ideal unity which rises through 
and above the diversity of the parts; the abiding 
calm which refines and controls the passion of the 
moment. It was this, probably, that Hegel had in 
mind when he said that a new organ in the soul of 
man was opened by Winckelmann. Lastly, his own 
life was a shining proof that no liberal study, least of 
all the study of art, has accomplished its full work, 
until it has transfused itself into the very life and 
temper of the student. In this respect, above all 
others, he reverted to what was best in the aims and 
spirit of the Eenaissance. 

" One learns nothing from him," said Goethe in his 
later years, " but one becomes something." The first 
part of this judgment is liable to mislead. Even on 



200 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the technical side, Winckelmann had taught his gen- 
on Goethe in eration a lesson never to be forgotten. In 
particular. ex p unding the spirit of Greek art, he had 
rendered a yet greater service ; and no man had profited 
by it more than Goethe. Doubtless, the reflex effect 
on his inner and more personal life, of which Goethe 
speaks in the closing words, was still more important. 
But it is certain that no such inward experience 
could have come to him save through the intellect 
and imagination. It was because, thanks to Winekel- 
mann's teaching, he had " found " Greek art and the 
Greek spirit through the intellect that he was able 
to draw what they had to offer into his spiritual life 
and make it, in the fullest sense, his own possession. 
On neither side can his debt to Winckelmann justly 
be ignored; and, in his deliberate judgment, Goethe 
himself would have been the last to ignore it. It 
is even possible, perhaps, to distinguish between the 
two strains of that influence in the imaginative work 
of Goethe — between the more intellectual and artistic, 
on the one hand, and the more inward and spiritual 
upon the other. The former, the less completely 
assimilated, appears in such poems as Die Braut von 
Korinth and the second part of Faust The latter, 
the more vital and individual influence, is embodied 
for all time in the Iphigenie. 

The personal attraction possessed by Winckelmann 

in so high a degree was denied to Herder (1744-1803), 

and the want of it has left marked traces 

Herder. 

not only on his life but on his written 
work. His intense combativeness led him to quarrel 



GERMANY. 201 

with one friend after another. It led him also to 
take up the cudgels on matters which he either 
would not or could not be at the pains to under- 
stand. Hence his estrangement from Goethe, and 
his misguided outbreak against Kant. 

The fifty odd volumes of his writings cover a large 
variety of subjects; but they are marked by a singular 
pioneer of unity of spirit and aim. Through them all, 
evolution, foe is the prophet of evolution. Whether his 
subject be literature, or philosophy, or history, the one 
interest that impels him is to trace the birth and early 
growth of human energy in some one of its countless 
forms ; to follow it back to its first distinguishable 
germ, and forward again through the more primitive 
stages of its development. He is possessed not merely 
by the idea of such growth in itself, but by many 
of the other ideas and sentiments which commonly 
group themselves around it. He has the same belief 
in the ultimate dependence of man upon purely 
natural conditions — a auch Geist und Moralitat sind 
Physik " ; the same faith in the obscurer and more 
instinctive side of man's nature; the same distrust 
of the artificiality attending the later stages of any 
literary or political development ; the same suspicion 
of any approach to formalism, or even to system, in 
man's attempts to account for the past achievements 
of the race or the operations of his own instincts and 
capacities, which reappear in so many evolutionists 
of the present day. Few men have had a keener 
eye for the elementary — or, as he loves to call them, 
the "genetic" — forces in our nature. And his chief 



202 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

importance is that he was among the earliest to insist 
— which he did almost to weariness — upon their 
significance, or to illustrate the extent of their 
operation. 

Enthusiasm is the dominant note of Herder's 

literary temper; a tendency to dithyrambs is the 

Enthusiast dominant note of his style. Not that he 

and critic.. was ^ j n an y sensej without the critical 

faculty. On the contrary, if we may judge from 
Goethe's account of their early intercourse, it was the 
first thing to strike those with whom he was brought 
in contact. He was keenly alive to the weak points 
of others ; and of his own work he was a judge severe 
enough to be perpetually dissatisfied with what he had 
already accomplished, and to be always reaching after 
something better. Hence the restless energy with 
which he recast one writing after another ; the fever- 
ish discontent which made him regard each volume as 
the rough draft of the next. The pity is that the two 
sides of his nature, never perhaps evenly balanced, 
should have tended in later years to fall more and 
more apart. Certainly, he came more and more to 
reserve his enthusiasm for the first loves of his youth, 
and to turn a severely critical eye upon the new 
knowledge and the new world of imagination which 
were laid open with such abounding wealth during 
the last twenty years of his life. It is disappointing 
that the man who assailed so keenly the superficial 
philosophy of the "enlightenment" should have en- 
tirely failed to see the significance of Kant; that, 
after devoting the best years of his life to the study 



GERMANY. 203 

of primitive poetry, he should have had little but 
scorn for the labours of Wolf in the same field ; 
that, after hailing Gotz and Werther with almost idol- 
atrous admiration, he should have looked so coldly 
upon the far greater works of Goethe's prime. 

All these things must be taken into account in 
estimating the extent and depth of Herder's powers. 
But they must not blind us to the great services 
which he rendered to the intellectual movement of 
his day. If he has the faults, he has also in large 
measure the virtues, of the pioneer. His work may 
have been hasty ; it may seldom have been thoroughly 
thought out ; but it covered a wonderfully wide field, 
and, at least during the first twenty years of his 
activity, it was not merely fruitful in its influence 
but of high worth in itself. 

With so prolific a writer, the only difficulty is to 
select. The distinctively religious writings, which of 
themselves fill nearly twenty volumes, lie beyond our 
scope. There remain those which may be roughly 
classified as belonging either to philosophy or to 
literature. Of the former, the chief are Auch eine 
Philosophie der Geschichte (1774), Ideen zur Menschen- 
geschichte (1784-1791), and the Humanitatsbriefe (1793), 
all of which deal, more or less closely, with the phil- 
osophy of history ; and, in a more metaphysical view, 
the Sjpinozagesprdche, 1 which may be defined as a reduc- 
tion of that great philosopher's system to its lowest 
terms (1787), the Metahritik and Kalligone, a series 
of laboured attacks on the writings of Kant (1799- 

1 Herder himself gave it the more adventurous title of Gott. 



204 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

1800). Of the latter, the most important are the 
following : Fragmente zur deutschen Litteratur, origin- 
ally conceived as a running commentary on the 
Litteraturlriefe of Lessing and others (1767 - 68) ; 
Kritische W alder, likewise in part suggested by the 
writings of Lessing, in particular by his points of 
difference from Winckelmann (1768-69); Stimmen 
der Volker in Lieder, originally compiled in 1773-74 
but not published, and then with considerable addi- 
tions, until 1778 - 79 ; and finally Der Geist der 
Fbraischen Poesie (1782-83). 

Of the philosophical writings, the only one which 
makes any pretence to system is the Ideen zur Men- 
schengeschichte, Herder's main contribution 
to the philosophy of history and, indirectly, 
to the theory of political philosophy. Of all his works 
it is the most elaborate and, with one exception, the 
most important. Vague though it is, it did perhaps 
more than any other book to diffuse, and in some 
measure to crystallise, those ideas of evolution which 
were then floating in the air, and to which men like 
Lamarck and Goethe were about to give scientific 
precision. The avowed object of the work is, on 
the one hand, to assign to man his due place in the 
world of nature; and, on the other, to trace his 
upward growth from a purely natural to a moral 
and spiritual existence. In Herder's original con- 
ception, that is, man is at once a link, the last link, 
in the chain of nature, and a collective being whose 
life is determined by reason and capable of progress. 
And there are moments when he seems to hold in 



GERMANY. 205 

his hand the idea of evolution as an unbroken process, 
leading by an infinite gradation of changes from the 
simplest forms of organic, or even of inorganic, life 
to the highest recorded stage of human civilisation ; 
and, beyond that again, to further stages, as yet 
unimagined and unimaginable, which are hidden from 
us in the darkness of the distant future. But the 
chain, which we believed the writer to have grasped, 
is almost immediately broken short; and the bold 
design comes to little or nothing in the execution. 
The latter of his two main theses he soon wearies 
of pursuing; the former he can scarcely be said 
seriously to attempt. At the critical moment, the 
determining factor is the " genetic force " peculiar to 
man himself; and where, as in the case of speech, 
that is held not to suffice, it is not a natural, but a 
supernatural, agency that he throws into the gap. 

In the face of these and other obvious blemishes, 
it remains true that the Ideen is a work of high 
philosophy of originality. It is not only that, as in the 
mstory. matter of evolution, Herder points the way 
to more than he is himself able to carry out. That 
is, in itself, a great service; and none the less so, 
because it is difficult precisely to define. But the 
whole treatise abounds in hints, in " ideas," which 
have proved of the utmost significance in the sub- 
sequent course of speculation. Thus his treatment 
of the relation between individual nations and 
the natural surroundings amid which their history 
has been wrought out marks a decided advance on 
Montesquieu. Still more significant is the stress 



206 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

he lays on the "second birth" that comes to man 
through the traditional culture into which he is born, 
and through which he receives not merely his capac- 
ity for controlling the forces of nature without, but 
the whole body of beliefs and ideals that mould him 
from within. This is a truth which has loomed more 
and more largely in the subsequent development of 
political philosophy. And, with the exception of Vico 
and Eousseau — to both of whom his inferiority must at 
once be admitted — it may be doubted whether Herder 
was not the earliest of modern writers to divine its 
significance. What is certain is that, taken as a 
whole, the Ideen marks an immense advance upon 
such a work as Voltaire's JEssai sur les Mceurs (1756); 
that it did much to inspire Humboldt's Kosmos ; and 
that, in some momentous points, it anticipates, though 
dimly and confusedly, so great a work as Hegel's 
Philosophie der Geschichte. 

Into Herder's assaults on Kant there is no need 
to enter. Except as a protest against the endless 
ms uterary divisions and schematisations of the great 
work. philosopher — a protest which is significant 

as coming from the prophet of the unconscious and 
the genetic — they are entirely futile. We may at 
once pass to his distinctively literary work. Here 
there are no such deductions to make. Here he is 
on his own ground; here his weakness in sustained 
thought is of little account. It is not, of course, to 
be expected that even here he should at all points 
be equally well armed. His judgments of contem- 
porary literature were from the first uncertain; and, 



GERMANY. 207 

in later years, when his spirit had become soured 
by poverty and by what he regarded as neglect, 
they betray an unmistakable tinge of jealousy and 
bitterness. He exalts Lessing, with whom in his 
heart he had little sympathy, in order to depreciate 
Goethe and Schiller. He mocks at Wallenstein, with 
nothing better to put in its place than the Gustav 
Wasa of Kotzebue.V 

This was the weakness of discouragement and ill- 
health. In happier days he had been very different. 
With more than Lessing's enthusiasm, though with 
far less than his knowledge and analytical genius, 
he had carried forward the work of Lessing. He 
had continued it and, in his zealous acceptance of 
romantic ideals, he had gone beyond it. His achieve- 
ment in this field naturally falls under two heads — 
critical and constructive. 

Of his distinctly critical work, which is the less 
important, it is only possible to speak very briefly, 

Herder and and mainly of its relation to Lessing. 

Lessing. j n j^ ear ii es £ writing, the Fragmente, 
he avowedly bases himself upon the Litteraturfo^iefe, 
though he speedily quits his original design for 
a more independent method. Yet even here the 
divergence, which was to become more and more 
marked in the years immediately following, is 
sufficiently apparent. In tacit opposition to his 
forerunners, he gives far more weight to the col- 
lective element in literature ; to the influence of 
national temperament and tradition, particularly as 

1 See the covert allusions in Adrastea (1801-3). 



208 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

embodied in language. 1 And in avowed opposition 
to them, he starts from the principle that to see 
beauties is better than to find faults, and that " the 
best way to judge an author is by the design of his 
own work." 2 It is manifest that we have here, at 
least in germ, the fundamental canon of romantic 
criticism; the rejection of any absolute standard, of 
any standard which can be applied without constant 
modification, to matters of imaginative art, the in- 
sistence that allowance must be made for differences 
not only of national, but of individual, temperament ; 
the plea for an open mind in all judgments on literary 
merit. It is to be regretted that he should not have 
taken his own principles more thoroughly to heart ; 
and that in later years he should have resorted more 
and more to the dogmatic criticism which he had 
begun by assailing. 

In his next work, Kritische Walder, he takes a still 
further step in opposition to Lessing; a move of no 

Kritische less significance in the romantic campaign. 

waider. jj e j iere mee t s the principle which lies 

at the foundation of Laokoon, the assertion of an 
essential distinction between poetry and the plastic 
arts, boldly in the face ; and roundly charges Lessing 
— not without justice, it must be admitted — with 
greatly exaggerating its importance. While justly 
maintaining Lessing's criticism of purely descriptive 
poetry, — a form which is mainly significant as a step 
in the incipient revolt against classical restrictions, 

1 Nearly the whole of the first volume is devoted to such questions. 

2 Fragmente, t. ii., Preface. 



GERMANY. 209 

— he is eager to mark the points in which poetry 
is able to draw from the sister arts ; to sweep away 
the rigid limitation to action which Lessing had 
striven to impose on poetry ; to insist that poetry 
also has an element of the picturesque, that it is 
capable — in some respects more capable than paint- 
ing — of presenting objects in repose. 1 Here again 
the romantic tendencies of Herder come to the sur- 
face, as they do in his plea for admitting the ugly 
into art, 2 or again in a friendly criticism of Winckel- 
mann which appears in another part of the treatise. 
"Die Kunst des Alterthums" he urges, "is rather a 
historical metaphysic of the beautiful than, in the 
strict sense, a history of art." 3 And it is evident 
that, while willing to make his bow to the former, 
he would in his own heart have preferred the latter. 
The reason for the preference is plain. He looked 
askance at "metaphysic," not merely because he 
feared it might tend to shackle the freedom of the 
artist, but because, with the irrepressible instinct of 
the romantic, he was uneasy at anything which inter- 
fered with the strictest application of the historical 
method. 

It is, however, to his constructive work that we 

must look for his true self and for what was most 

Primitive fruitful in his influence. It is here that 

poetry. ftie vein of thought, for which he was 

searching somewhat blindly in his critical writings, 

rises spontaneously to the surface. From the first 

1 Krit. Wdlder, i. 180-222 (ed. Stuttgart- Tubingen, 1827). 

2 lb., i. 222-241. 3 lb., i. 27. 

O 



210 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

he had felt the spell of primitive poetry, the poetry 
which is the creation of the race rather than of 
the individual; and, as years went on, it was round 
this that all the deepest elements in his nature 
— his quick sense of " genetic forces," his passion 
for tracing the rising of the sap and the gradual 
forming of the bud, his keen delight in the ele- 
mental workings of man's energy — came more and 
more to gather. The very language of such poetry 
came to him charged with the smell of the fields 
from which it sprang ; laden with echoes of the 
" subterraneous music " of the soil. Perhaps there is 
no other writer, if we except Jakob and Wilhelm 
Grimm, who has been so keenly alive to all this 
as Herder. In all his most notable writings, from 
the Fragmente to the Geist der Ebraischen Poesie and 
the El Cid, he reverts to it with an enthusiasm that 
never wearies. With the matter of primitive poetry, 
or what by any interpretation could pass for such, 
he was no less in sympathy. In Homer, Ossian, the 
songs of Shakespeare, in which he rightly recognised 
an echo of popular melody, his delight was inex- 
haustible. And in his collection of national poetry, 
gathered from the Lapps, the Finns, the Lithuanians, 
the Servians, the Border Ballads, and an infinity of 
other sources in the new world as well as the old, 
— "The voice of the nations in song," as the pub- 
lishers called it, — we have what is probably the 
most enduring monument of his genius. It is not 
only that the translations, the majority of which in 
their metrical shape are from Herder's own hand, 



GERMANY. 211 

are executed with extraordinary skill. But the very 
design of the work, an universal Corpus Poeticum of 
primitive races, was entirely without precedent. It 
was an attempt to weave the results of Macpherson, 
Percy, and a score of forgotten scholars and travellers 
into one. It supplied the material for a comparative 
criticism which he himself did not at the moment 
attempt. And, what is yet more important, it was 
a manifesto on behalf of simplicity and colour and 
swiftness of action — in a word, of the romantic 
qualities in poetry — which woke a deep response 
in the heart of Goethe and other writers of the 
time. Several of Goethe's earlier poems are folk- 
songs; one of them at least, Heidenvoslein, is an 
adaptation of a piece contained in this very col- 
lection of Herder's; 1 and even in his later Ballads 
the impulse, originally derived from Herder, is hardly 
to be mistaken. One whole section of the volume, 
again, is devoted to the Norse Songs, which Gray 
had already drawn upon, and which were to wield 
so deep an influence both in Germany and England. 
Another is largely given to the Spanish Eomances, 
which played so great a part in the subsequent 
history both of German and French poetry, and to 
which he himself was to return, at the close of his 
life, in a fine translation of El Cid. Finally, in his 
later writings, Herder was among the first to recog- 
nise the new world of oriental poetry which Sir 

1 Goethe himself contributed one piece — and it is one of the finest 
— to the collection, Klaggesang aus dem Morlackischen. It is to be 
found in his collected poems. 



212 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

William Jones and other scholars were just begin- 
ning to lay open. 1 In this direction he may fairly 
claim to have prepared the way for the Schlegels 
and Schelling, and even to have cast the seed which 
was ultimately to bear fruit in Goethe's West-ostlicher 
Divan. 

All this serves to mark out the position of Herder 
with sufficient clearness. If Lessing was the critic of 
His relation the transition, Herder, in criticism as in 
to romance, other fields, was the prophet of romance. 
Here, however, it is necessary to distinguish. It is 
to the romance which finds its roots either in in- 
dividual sentiment or, still more, in the primitive 
life of nations — to romance, as it came to him 
from the hands of Eousseau and the British poets 
— that he attaches himself ; not to romance as 
it subsequently took shape in the writings of the 
Schlegels or of Tieck. With the purely artistic 
impulse, which prompted so much of the later mani- 
festations of the romantic spirit, he had little or no 
sympathy ; still less with the romanticism of in- 
dividual caprice. He was too strongly drawn to- 
wards the spontaneous and the primitive, for the 
one; he was too much a disciple of the "Aufklarung," 
had too deep a faith in measure and "reason," for 
the other. In poetry, as in the other fields of human 
activity, it is towards the primeval and elemental that 
his heart went out ; and it was only so far as, rightly 
or wrongly, he conceived these qualities to lie in it 
that he felt any deep admiration for the poetry of his 

1 E.g., Ebrdische Poesie (17S2) ; Das Rosenthal (1798). 



GERMANY. 213 

contemporaries. Hence his devotion to Klopstock 
and, what does more credit to his discernment, to 
the "storm and stress" of Goethe. Hence also, to 
take the obverse of the medal, his irritation at the 
elaborate futilities of the Schlegels and, so far as 
it did not spring from personal causes, at the 
" classical " tendencies of the later works of Schiller 
and Goethe. 

His true masters, as has been said, were Eousseau 
and the band of writers who may roughly be grouped 
round Percy. From Eousseau he had the deep vein 
of sentiment, the suspicion of all purely intellectual 
processes, which lay at the core of the whole romantic 
movement, and is that which united its wider with 
its narrower, and more technical, developments. With 
Eousseau, again, he shares the tendency to throw back 
to the more primitive forms of human society; and 
this tendency he extends, as Eousseau himself can 
hardly be said to have extended it, 1 from the sphere 
of politics to that of literature and art. In his zeal 
for primitive poetry he may fairly claim to have 
opened a new spring of feeling ; and the debt which 
the poetry of his own country, and not least that of 
Goethe, owes to him in this matter is hardly to be 
over-rated. At this point it is clear that we pass 
from the influence of Eousseau to that of our own 
countrymen, from the less to the more definite work- 
ing of the romantic influence. 

With the later romanticists, indeed, he has nothing 

1 Le Levite d'Ephraim, which cod soled him in his flight from France, 
is a partial exception. So is the Essay Sur VOrigine des Langues. 



214 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

in common. The qualities that part him from them 
have been mentioned already. In the last 

His limitations. . . . . 

resort, they all now from the critical vein 
in his nature ; from the faith which, in common with 
most men of his age, Rousseau included, he never 
ceased to cherish in the more conscious and logical 
working of man's reason. No doubt, in him, as in 
Rousseau, this was met by a current running precisely 
counter. But it still flowed, though often deep beneath 
the surface; and, in Goethe's judgment, it was the 
determining force in his spirit — "a spirit dialectical 
rather than constructive." 1 Such a verdict perhaps 
hardly does justice to the originality of the man. 
But it points to his weakness, as well as to one 
source of his strength. If by constructive power be 
meant the pow 7 er which enables a man to weave the 
thoughts that come to him by reflection or intuition 
into a consistent whole, to see the bearing of each 
upon the others, and to draw out of them all that 
is implicitly contained in them, then Herder was not 
constructive. His mind was intensely active. The 
ideas from which he started were original and fruitful. 
But he himself seems never to be entirely master of 
them. He combines and recombines them in a be- 
wildering variety of ways. 2 But he appears to move 
on the surface of them rather than to work his way 
into their depths ; to use them rather as missiles 

1 Annalen (year 1795). 

2 See Schiller's letter to Goethe (June 18, 1796). "His method is 
to aim at perpetual combinations, to join ideas which others hold apart. 
And the effect of this on my mind is one not of order but confusion." 
Goethe speaks of his "endless soap-bubbles" (Gespriichc, i. 25). 



GERMANY. 215 

against the adversary of the moment than as instru- 
ments for arriving at further truth. Hence the 
broken nature of his work. His first book was 
avowedly a collection of Fragments. And all his 
subsequent writings might with equal justice have 
been called Fragments or Torsos} 

If Herder was the critic of romanticism in its 
earlier phases, Burger (1747-1794) was its repre- 
Burger's sentative poet. And this is true of his 
Ballads. lyrical pieces, hardly less than of his 
ballads. It was by the ballads, however, that he 
first made his name ; and it is by them that he 
survives. Two of these, Lenore and Der wilde Jager, 
stand out unapproached in their kind ; and a third, 
Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenheim, is not im- 
measurably below. All three were conceived and 
begun in 1773, the year of Gotz von Berlichingen; 2 
though the first only — his "eagle, or rather condor, 
of ballads" 3 — was completed and published at that 
time (1774), the two others considerably later (1786, 
1782). All of them bear unmistakable marks of the 
period from which they sprang ; all breathe the " glad 
confident morning " of the romantic triumph. What 
distinguishes them from later poems of the same stock 
— those of Goethe, for instance, or Keats or Hugo — is 
that they are more completely popular in spirit ; that 

1 There is a generous tribute to Herder in Goethe's Maskenzug of 
Dec. 1818. Werke, t. xv., pp. 203-206. 

2 " The Gotz has again inspired me for three new stanzas of Lenore.'" 
Letter to Boie of July 8, 1773. 

3 Letter to Boie of August 14, 1773. 



216 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

they attempt to catch the tone of the primitive ballad, 
and nothing more. In vivid colouring, in movement, in 
command of terror — and it is clear that the two first of 
these at any rate were regarded by Blirger as qualities 
essential to popular, if not to all other forms of poetry 
— they stand alone. But, perhaps for this very reason, 
there is nothing of the subtle suggestion, nothing 
of the poignant melancholy, which is the dominant 
note of Erlkonig or Gastibelza or La belle Dame sans 
Merci. Everything in them, to use Biirger's own 
words, is " clear, definite, and rounded to complete- 
ness/' x Indeed, the one fault to be found with them 
is that they are too " rounded " and precise ; and that, 
for this reason, they not only depart in some measure 
from the model they aim at following, but miss some- 
thing of the imaginative effect which it is their object 
to produce. The effect intended, and in part achieved, 
is that of supernatural horror. But the very distinct- 
ness, on which Biirger prides himself, fights against 
absolute attainment ; so does the element of sensation, 
almost of melodrama, in the incidents, and the metallic 
ring of the phrasing and the rhythm. All this serves 
to suggest the limitations of the creed held by the 
first generation of romantic poets and critics. 2 It 
shows the impossibility of transplanting to one age 
that which was the natural outgrowth of another. 

1 Preface to second edition of his Poems (1789). 

2 It is curious to see how completely Burger regards himself as at 
one with Herder. " What a delight to find that a man like Herder 
taught with clearness and distinctness about the lyric of the people, 
which is the lyric of nature, what I had long felt and thought about 
it more dimly." Letter to Boie of June 13, 1773. 



GERMANY. 217 

It proves how right was the instinct of those later 
poets who, while accepting the form of the primitive 
ballad, willingly suffered it to be re-shaped by the 
spirit of their own time and their own individuality. 
But the belief that exact reproduction was possible 
and desirable is intensely characteristic of the dawn 
of the romantic movement ; and, without that child- 
like faith, it may well be that less would have been 
accomplished. The greater spirits, such as Goethe, 
speedily outgrew it. But Bilrger, as well as Herder, 
seems to have retained it to the end. 

The ballads of Btirger form an enduring landmark 

in the history not only of German but of European 

romance. His lyrics can hardlv claim this 

His lyrics. . " 

importance. But, none the less, they are 
of singular beauty in themselves ; and they bear on 
them all the characteristics of the romantic dawn. 
They lack the brilliance of the ballads ; but they have 
a simplicity, a sincerity, a passionate directness, which 
more than reconcile us to the loss. All that is best in 
them is contained in the Lieder an Molly (1774-1786), 
a pathetic record of hopeless struggle against a doubly 
unlawful passion. It may be true, as Schiller urged, 1 
that the love painted in these poems is not of the 
most spiritual. But such a criticism is the purest 
pedantry. It would be fatal to some of the finest 
love-poetry ever written. And, had it been ten times 
sounder than it is, Schiller, with his own early poems 
in the background, was the last man in the world to 
make it. In another objection, aimed at the smaller 

1 In his somewhat ungenerous review of £iirger 5 -= Poems (1791). 



218 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

poet by the greater, there is more of justice. Some of 
the lyrics — among them those which, in other respects, 
reach the highest level — may be admitted to be too 
lavish in expression; had they been shorter, they 
would have left a deeper mark. This has commonly 
been the besetting sin of romantic poetry — at least of 
that kind which gives utterance to the personal feel- 
ings of the writer. But it is not a fault which can be 
charged upon all the lyrics of Burger. The sonnets, a 
form destined to play a conspicuous part in the later 
romanticism of Germany, are entirely free from it. 
So are some few of the more distinctly lyrical pieces 
— Molly's Werth, for instance — which are not alto- 
gether unworthy of comparison with the love-songs 
of Burns. 

Of Burger's remaining works it is impossible to 
speak. It must suffice to mention his fragments of 
translation from Ossian (1779) and his specimens of 
translation from the Iliad — first into rather lumbering 
blank verse (1771-76), then into hexameters (1784) — 
and from the second JEndd, into hexameters (1777). 
All these may be treated as symptoms of the same 
critical beliefs and tendencies which found higher 
expression in his original poetry. 

The deeper note which makes itself heard both in 
the ballads and lyrics of Goethe is doubtless wanting 
to those of Burger. That, however, was the secret of 
supreme genius — the genius which stands above all 
literary movements, however much it may have 
learned from them, however much it may have 
taken its first impulse from them. And, if such 



GERMANY. 219 

supreme genius was denied to Burger, that is no 
reason why we should be blind to the smaller light 
which he undoubtedly possessed. It is no reason why 
we should disparage the value of the movement by 
which the greater genius was so deeply influenced, 
and of which Burger, in lyric as in ballad poetry, 
is the most complete and the greatest representative. 

From the apostle of romance we pass to the one 

writer who stands above all schools ; or rather, who 

gathers into his genius all that is best in 

Goethe. ° ° 

all. The life of Goethe (1749-1832) was 
prolonged far beyond the allotted span. And the 
mass of his writings is so great that it can only be 
dealt with by a rigorous process of selection. His 
literary activity, previous to the death of Schiller, 
may be roughly divided into three periods : (1), 
1770-1786, the period spent at Strassburg, Wetzlar, 
Frankfurt, as student, and eventually, in name at 
least, practitioner of civil law; then, after 1775, at 
Weimar, as councillor, and before long, minister to 
the Duke, Karl August — a position which, in a quite 
informal manner, he retained till death; (2), 1786- 
1794, the period from the Italian journey (1786-88) 
until the opening of his friendship with Schiller ; 
(3), 1794-1805, the period of unbroken co-operation 
with Schiller, only ended by the death of the latter 
(May, 1805). 

In a life of amazing industry there are few fields 
of human activity, literary or practical, which he 
did not enter and make his own. For years he 



220 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

was the life and soul of the government of Weimar ; 
superintending the working of the mines, 

His range. , , 

standing between the peasants and the 
reckless sportsmanship of the Duke ; manager of 
the Court Theatre, which he made one of the best 
in Germany; benevolent despot of the libraries at 
Weimar and Jena. Equally wide is his scope as 
poet and thinker. There are "few kinds of writing 
which he did not attempt ; none, which he attempted 
and did not adorn." Eeflective poetry, drama, idyll, 
ballad, lyric, romance, criticism — in all these he has 
left masterpieces of the first rank. His lyrics and 
ballads, in particular, are unsurpassed, and have 
seldom even been approached. His maxims on life 
and manners are perhaps the deepest and wisest 
upon record. In natural science and the region 
where science borders on philosophy he unites an 
instinct for empirical observation witli speculative 
genius to a degree which is probably unique. It 
was in the nature of such powers to unfold slowly ; 
and, apart from this, with a man so keen to appro- 
priate all that offered itself from without, we must 
expect to find more difference between the fruit of 
one period and that of another than is commonly 
the case with great writers. It is fortunate that 
his power of resistance, his inwardness, was equal 
to his receptivity. It was this, and this alone, that 
saved him from losing himself in a desert of un- 
assimilated culture. 

I. (1770-1786.) Of the longer works which fall 
within this period the following are the most im- 



GERMANY. 221 

portant: Gotz von Berlichingen (1773), Leiden des 
jungen Werthers (1774), Clavigo (1774), Stella 1 (1775), 
Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit (1777-78), and Eg- 
mont, which, though not published, nor in its present 
shape finished, till the end of Goethe's Italian journey 
(1788), was begun before he left Frankfurt (1775), 
and was mainly composed during the earlier years 
at Weimar (1775-1782). Of these, it is only pos- 
sible to notice the two first, with their satiric counter- 
part, Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit. 

His two earliest works established the fame of 
Goethe at one stroke, not only in Germany but 
over all western Europe. 2 Both of them, 
though in very different ways, draw their 
inspiration from romance. Gotz is a return to the 
feudal ages. Feudal castles, feudal knights, feudal 
bishops, are the stock material of the piece. A 
gipsies' camp and a sitting of the Wehmgericht are 
thrown in, to give colour and to freeze the blood ; 
while Martin Luther flits across the stage to give 
warning that the dawn is at hand. But it would 
be an injustice to suppose that Goethe was mainly, 

1 This curious play, which in its present form (1805) is a tragedy, 
was originally provided with a cheerful ending, or what was intended 
for such, the " double arrangement" of The Rovers (1798). The 
latter is a double-barrelled burlesque of Stella and Die Rauber ; but, 
on the whole, Goethe is hit much more severely than Schiller. 

2 See the curious anecdotes related in the Italienische Reise ( WerJce, 
t. xix., p. 245; t. xx., p. 6; Cotta's edition, 36 vols., 8vo, 1866). 
All references will be to this edition. I have ventured to speak of 
Gotz as his earliest work ; it was in fact preceded — in writing, 
though not in publication — by Die Mitschuldigen and one or two 
others, now seldom read. 



222 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

or even much, engrossed with the outward trappings 
of romance. If he goes to the middle ages, it is not 
so much in the spirit of Scott as of Schiller; not 
so much from love of the antique and the pictur- 
esque, as because he found there a fitting scene for 
that struggle against the tyranny of circumstance 
which for the moment riveted his imagination. He 
remarks himself, in Wahrhcit unci Dichtung} not al- 
together with satisfaction, that the popularity of the 
play was due more to its matter than its literary 
quality ; and the remark is probably just. G 
sprang, in truth, from the ferment of discontent 
against " the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of stat- 
ute, law, and custom,'' which a dozen years earlier 
had found voice in Eousseau. And, if Goethe him- 
self had not been stirred to the depths by this feel- 
ing, we may safely say that the book would never 
have been written. Indeed, the very passage referred 
to makes it abundantly plain that his studies at 
Wetzlar, the capital of Imperial Law, had not a 
little to say in the temper of which Got: was the 
poetic outcome. In spite of this, it is true that the 
form of the play is hardly less memorable than its 
matter. Its vividness, its abrupt style, its glaring 
defiance of the Unities,, its obvious debt to the 
historical plays of Shakespeare — " our father and 
master," as Goethe calls him, in speaking of this 
period 2 — all these things stamp it as the offspring 
of romance ; all combine with the historical theme 
and the atmosphere of revolt to make its appearance 
1 Werh; t. xii., p. 126. - lb., p. 134. 



GERMANY. 223 

an epoch in the history of German literature. And, 
if this is true of the play, as published in 1773, still 
more may it be said of the first draft, which belongs 
to 1771. Here the colours are laid on with a bold- 
ness of sweep which Mrs Kadcliffe or Monk Lewis 
might have envied. There is a ghost who appears 
to wake the heroine to remorse. There is a mur- 
derer who has in him enough of the modern burglar 
to emerge from beneath his victim's bed. 

Popular as was Gotz, the vogue of Werther was 
infinitely greater. And not without reason. The 
theme, at bottom, is still inspired by 
Kousseau, But here Goethe drops all 
attempt to throw himself back into the past — 
where, indeed, unless Faust be taken as an ex- 
ception, he was never thoroughly at home. He 
drops the peremptory style, together with the rest 
of the romantic machinery of Gotz. He trusts solely 
to the inherent interest of the subject, and his 
own splendid eloquence. The tale is drawn straight 
from the life of the day ; it paints directly, and 
without a shadow of artistic subterfuge, the mood 
through which Goethe himself was passing at the 
moment — the vague sense of unrest, melancholy, and 
unsatisfied longing which besets the young at all 
times, and which was probably never so strong as 
in the generation immediately preceding the great 
upheaval of the Eevolution. 1 A sense of chafing 
uneasiness against the bonds of an outworn and 
artificial society plays a certain part in Werther as 

1 WerJce, t. xii., pp. 98, 134-146. 



224 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

we have it (1786) ; it played a far more decisive 
part in the romance as originally written and pub- 
lished. 1 Yet, even in the earlier version, this is only 
the background to a tragedy of love, leading to de- 
spair and self - destruction. And it was this, even 
more than the charm of the wider theme, that took 
the world by storm. For passion, there had been 
nothing like it since La nouvelle Hdo'ise ; and there 
is more than an echo of Rousseau in its sense of 
home -life, and its instinct for the gentler aspects 
and the finer touches of nature. " Charlotte cutting 
bread and butter for the children " has become a 
by - word ; but it is impossible to deny the genius 
of the picture. And it needs no visit to the upper 
Lahn to assure ourselves that Goethe was born with 
an eye for the more smiling moods of nature. In- 
deed, it is unjust to hint even that much of limita- 
tion. His habit was to a let every change of place 
or season work upon him, each in its own way." 2 
And to the energy of that habit, which not only 
stored his mind with imagery but gave it something 
of the child's freshness, there is abundant witness 
in his earliest romance. 

Taken together, these two early works stand alone 
among the writings of Goethe. Apart from Faust, 
they are the only two of his more important pieces 
which can fairly be classed as romantic in purport. 
And, perhaps for that very reason, their immediate 

1 It was this apparently on which Napoleon fastened in his famous 
interview with Goethe (Annalen, year 1808). 

2 Werke, t. xii., p. 93. 



GEKMANY. 225 

influence was far greater than can be claimed for 
any of his later efforts. To Herder, for instance, he 
always remained the poet of Gotz and Werther ; and 
among foreigners the tradition lingered with even 
greater persistence. Both pieces are flagrantly im- 
mature. Yet both are abiding landmarks in the 
literary history of Germany and of Europe. Werther 
represents the wider and vaguer aspect of the romantic 
movement — its melancholy, its sentiment, its instinct 
for reflecting the changing moods of man on the out- 
ward face of nature. Gotz, on the other hand, stands 
for the love of the unfamiliar and the past — in a 
less degree, for the vivid colouring and the hanker- 
ing after horror — which contribute so much to the 
stricter and more determinate forms of the romantic 
spirit. 

The immediate effect of Werther in Germany was 

to make despair the fashion of the hour. On Goethe 

himself it was precisely the reverse. 

Triumph der . 

Empnnd- " Once more I felt joyous and free, 
as one does after a general confession ; 
I had earned the right to turn over a new page in 
life." 1 Fortune stepped in to turn it for him ; 
within little more than a year after the publica- 
tion of Werther he was enlisted in the service of 
the Duke of Weimar. A few years, or even months, 
in what seemed to him the wider world of the 
little court had entirely changed the current of 
his imagination. And among those who mocked 
at Wertherism, the author of Werther was now 

1 Werke, t. xii., p. 139. 
P 



226 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the most conspicuous. Even before he left Frank- 
fort he had joined in the laugh raised against him 
and his hero by Nicolai. 1 Now he set himself to 
fire a more elaborate counterblast. Few satires are 
more amusing than that in which the archpriest of 
sentiment turned upon himself and the sentiment- 
alists in that "maddest" of musical farces, The 
Triumph of Sensibility. The prince, who travels 
with artificial scenery and adores an equally arti- 
ficial bride, is covered with good-humoured ridicule. 
And when the dummy bride is at last picked to 
pieces, it is a whole sentimental library — The Good 
Young Man and The new H&oise and The Sorrows 
of Werther — that tumbles from her bosom. This 
may be taken to mark the dividing line in the first 
period of Goethe's literary life. It is significant that 
the next year (1779) saw the first draft of Iphigenie. 

His greatest achievement, however, during these 

years, apart from the beginnings of Faust, is to be 

found in the Ballads and Lyrics. Of the 

Early lyrics. " . _ 

former, which are most conveniently re- 
served for comparison with his own later ballads and 
those of Schiller, the most important are Der Fischer, 
Frlkonig, and Der Konig in Thule. The latter, from 
which selection is an invidious task, include Will- 
hommen und Abschied, Auf dem See, and the two 
Mailieder ; Prometheus, Ganymed, Die Grenzen der 
Menschheit, and Das Gbttliche ; Harzreise im Winter, 
Zueignung, and Die Geheimnisse ; finally, Rastlose 
Liebe, Der Strauss den ich gepfucket, and Ueber alien 

1 In a satiric poem, Nicolai auf Werther' s Grabe. lb., p. 142, 



GEKMANY. 227 

Gipfeln ist Buh. The last three of these, with some 
of the others, were inspired by Frau von Stein, his 
love for whom was the most fruitful influence on 
his early years at Weimar ; as his letters to her are, 
apart from the later correspondence with Schiller, 
the most instructive commentary we possess on his 
inner life and his labours as Minister of the little 
duchy. 1 

Some of these pieces are not strictly lyrical, but 
rather reflective, narrative, or dramatic. Of the 
narrative kind, Die Geheimnisse and the Dedication, 
which originally served as a prelude to it, are unique 
examples. Both are written, with wonderful com- 
mand of rhythmical effect, in ottava rima ; and they 
embody some of Goethe's deepest convictions on 
religion, poetry, and the poet's quest after truth. 
Prometheus, the most notable fragment of the drama 
which Goethe began upon this subject, is undoubtedly 
the greatest of the " dramatic lyrics," giving utterance 
as it does to the defiant joy which Goethe himself felt 
in creative energy, and of which he found a fitting 
symbol in the god-man of the Greek legend. Like 
Das Gbttliche, and several other poems of this period, 
it is written in the unrhymed form of ode adopted by 
Klopstock, but touched into an entirely new beauty 
and solemnity by Goethe. In that form, guided by his 
marvellous ear for music in verse, he found the aptest 
expression for the grim defiance of fate, the stoical 

1 Of the prose works published by Goethe, two — Briefe aus der 
Schweiz (1779) and the Italienische Reise (1786-88) — were originally 
written as letters, mainly to Frau von Stein. 



228 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

submission to fate, which struggled for the mastery 
in his own spirit, and round which much of what 
is greatest in the poetry of this period tends to 
crystallise. 

It is, however, the simpler lyrics and, above all, the 
love-songs which have found their way most irresist- 
ibly into the heart of Europe; and who shall say that 
the popular estimate is wrong ? There is perhaps no 
mood of love which does not reflect itself in these 
poems. Desire, conflict, hope, discouragement, the 
rapture of possession, all are there. There, too, is the 
passionate yearning, a yearning from the nature of the 
case never to be satisfied, which, in a spirit like 
Goethe's, makes itself felt through all these moods, 
even through the very ecstasy of possession. Indeed, 
if there is one feeling to which Goethe's poetry, and 
in particular his earlier poetry, gives voice with more 
complete mastery than any other, it is the vague 
yearnings, "the desire of the moth for the star, of the 
night for the morrow," which seems to be inbred in 
the Teutonic races and which the Germans express- 
ively call Sehnsueht. Again and again, and not 
only in the love-poems, does Goethe return to the 
utterance of this longing; notably in the songs of 
Mignon and the Harper — most, if not all, of which 
belong to this period — and, w T ith unapproached genius, 
in the lyric beginning Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Huh. 
As regards form, the prevailing note of these early 
poems, apart from their haunting melody, is their ideal 
simplicity, — a simplicity which no poet, not even 
Wordsworth, has ever surpassed. 



GERMANY. 229 

II. (1786-1794) The Italian journey (1786-88) 
forms an epoch both in the personal and the literary- 
life of Goethe. Twice he had stood on the 

Italian journey. /.i/^-i-ita 

brow of the G-otthard Pass, and looked down 
into the " promised land " (1775, 1779). 1 Twice he had 
turned aside, feeling that ties of love still bound him 
to the north, and that, weighed against these, Italy- 
had "no charms" for him. But in the interval the 
longing, expressed in one of the most famous of his 
poems, 2 had grown on him with such intensity that 
he could hardly bear to read a Latin book or see an 
Italian landscape. Partly, no doubt, he was oppressed 
by the increasing burden of public business, which 
naturally grew with the growth of the general confi- 
dence in his powers. But the cause of his flight to 
Eome — for flight it was, or Hegira, as he called it 
himself — lay much deeper than this. Both as poet 
and as man, he had a vague instinct that he had it in 
him to reach higher than he had yet done. And he 
was right in believing that the one hope of doing so 
was to tear himself resolutely from his old moorings, 
to take time for silent thought, and to surround him- 
self with the influences which were most likely to 
deepen, quicken, and purify his imagination. It was 
the gain to his poetic life which naturally bulked most 
largely in his mind both during the sojourn in Italy 
and in looking forward to it. " I hope," he writes on 

1 WerJce, t. xii., pp. 292, 293 ; Brief e an Frau v. Stein, i. 274. The 
poem An ein goldenes Herz belongs to the former of these occasions. 

2 Kennst du das Land ? which would seem to have been written 
in or about 1783. It is alluded to in a letter of Feb. 1787, as 
familiar to Frau v. Stein : t. xix., p. 184. 



230 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

his journey, "to set my spirit at rest on the matter of 
the fine arts, to print their sacred image upon my soul 
and to treasure it there for silent fruition." 1 But the 
other possibilities of the venture, the " salto mortale," 
were never far from his thoughts. "Heaven grant," 
he says after the first few weeks at Eome were passed, 
" that the fruits, which this life in a wider world has 
brought to my character also, may make themselves 
felt ! Yes, it is not only the sense for art, but the 
sense for life also, which has found a great renewal " 
— or, as he says in another part of the same passage, 
"a new birth"— "in Italy." 2 

Such hopes were more than fulfilled. Nothing 

could well be greater than the change that came 

_, . „ over Goethe during the score of months 

Its influence ° 

on his life that he spent in Italy. To the rest- 
lessness, the unsatisfied cravings, of his 
earlier years there succeeded a calm, such as few 
men have ever attained. And this is as evident 
in his daily life as it is in his poetry and his intel- 
lectual activities. In the former, as some have 
thought, it may have been carried beyond measure. 
The "olympian repose" of the man, his shrinking 
from all that threatened to disturb it, has a question- 
able as well as a noble side. Even here, however, 
much is to be said in defence. And against the 
poetry, at any rate of this and the following period, 
the same objection, though sometimes urged, cannot 
justly be maintained. In Iphigenie and Hermann, in 

1 Tagebuch, 1786. 

2 Italienische Reise, t. xix., pp. 148, 149 (December 13-20, 1786). 



GERMANY. 231 

Tasso and the Wahlverwandschaften, in the Eonian 
Elegies and the Ballads, there is nothing of that 
aloofness, that withdrawal from the everyday passions 
of men, with which the art of Goethe has been indis- 
criminately charged. This is to be traced, if at all, 
only in the final period of his literary life, that which 
falls beyond the scope of the present inquiry. 

On one point there will be no difference of opinion. 
Between the earlier and later lyrics, between Werther 
or Egmont on the one hand and Iphigenie or Tasso on 
the other, there is a change of spirit which it is im- 
possible to overlook. And it is from the Italian 
journey that this change manifestly dates. What, 
then, was the temper in which Goethe entered on his 
journey ? What was it that he sought and found on 
classical soil ? Much, perhaps most, of what the 
modern traveller seeks in Italy had little or no mean- 
ing for him. From the mediaeval Church, 1 from 
Christian art and antiquities, from the early painters, 
even from the Eenaissance sculptors, 2 he turned 
wearily aside. The history of art seems to have 
ended for him with the Grseco-Koman sculptors and 
to have begun again only with Eaphael 3 and the 
Eenaissance architects. It was the classical artists, 
and those who in modern times have trodden most 

1 See the curious anecdote about his conduct at Assisi : t. xix. , 
pp. 114-117. Compare his impatience of Dante: t. xx., p. 77. 

2 I do not think there is a single reference to any one of them in 
the Italienische Reise. For the Frescoes of Michael Angelo he had 
unbounded admiration : t. xix., p. 144 ; xx., pp. 84, 87. 

3 He speaks of a preference for the Pre-Raphaelites as " ein Symp- 
tom halber und unfreier Talente." lb., p. 88. 



232 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

closely in their steps, that alone appear to have 
touched his imagination. It was the directness and 
simplicity, the grace and the calm, which belong to 
ancient art and to such modern developments as 
immediately derive from it, that sank into his soul, 
made him a new man, and opened a fresh era in his 
poetic activity. 

The chief poems belonging to this period — which, 
it must be remembered, is comparatively short — are 

Poems of Iphigenie, Tasso, and the Eoman Elegies; 

second period. an( j to these, though it was not actually 
written till a few years later, may be added, for 
reasons which will appear directly, Die Metamorphose 
der Pflanzen. The two first were conceived and, in 
some sense, executed at a much earlier date. Iphi- 
genie was first written and acted, as a prose drama, 
in 1779. 1 Tasso, likewise originally intended for a 
prose drama, was begun in 1780, and continued at 
intervals between that year and the Italian journey. 
But during and after that journey it was recast and 
completed in blank verse ; and in that form it was 
finally published in the spring of 1790. Yet, though 
both plays took rise before the visit to Italy, it is 
not by their first conception but by their final 
shape that they must be judged. Here, as with 
all great poetry, the matter is inseparable from 
the form ; and, as poems, they belong to a region in 

1 The first draft will be found in the Weimar edition of Goethe's 
Werke, t. 39. The prose version, commonly printed in the collected 
editions of Goethe's works, belongs to 1781. The variations between 
it and the first draft are, on the whole, small. 






GERMANY. 233 

which, as prose dramas, they could never have found 
place. Of the two, we are compelled to confine our 
notice to Iphigenie. 

Iphigenie, which in its poetic form (1786) was the 
first fruit of the Italian journey, 1 is among the 
greatest — perhaps it may fairly be reck- 
oned the most unassailable — of Goethe's 
masterpieces. A comparison with the prose version 
shows at a glance what is the direction in which 
the poet's genius was working, and what is the 
kind of attainment that was now placed within his 
reach. The characters, the plot, the incidents are 
in both versions practically the same. Even in 
language the variations are surprisingly small. But 
such changes as there are tend consistently to remove 
it further and further from the cut and thrust of 
ordinary speech, to give it more and more the stamp 
of the ideal. And what contributes still more 
effectively to the same end is the mere change from 
prose to verse. 2 It is true that the prose of the early 
drafts — like that of Gotz, only to a far greater 
degree — falls as often as not into blank verse ; a sign 
that, even in the earlier period, Goethe was reaching 
after a form of expression more adequate than he 
had yet found. But this only serves to make the dis- 
crepancy between aim and achievement more glaring. 
It is not only that we are constantly pulled up by 
the sharp transition from the rhythmical to the un- 

1 Its completion was announced to Frau v. Stein on Jan. 6, 1787 : 
t. xix., p. 156. 

2 For the labour which this cost Goethe see t. xix., p. 211. 



234 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

rhythmical. There is a still more baffling transition 
from the ideal to the matter-of-fact. Nothing can 
surpass the genius with which, in the poetic version, 
these blemishes are removed. 

But it is needless to linger further on questions of 
form. We pass at once to those of substance and 
conception. None of Goethe's dramas — perhaps no 
drama of modern times — is conceived in a calmer 
spirit. None is so remote from the fret and strife 
of earthly passion. The knot of the play lies not in 
a conflict between passion and passion, nor between 
interest and interest, but in the dim revolt of a 
woman's instinct, in her resolute refusal to allow 
either interest or gratitude to draw her by one hair's- 
breadth from what instinct tells her to be just. This 
carries with it two results, each of which contributes 
to the peaceful effect that dominates the whole. On 
the one hand, the woman's scruples are, in the end, 
triumphantly justified against the more eager, but 
narrower, vision of those who had striven to reason 
them away ; and what had threatened to be a tragedy, 
the last act in the doom of the house of Atreus, closes 
in reconciliation and hope. On the other hand, as 
regards the dramatic method of the poem, the whole 
stress is thrown upon the struggle waged in the heart 
of the heroine. Outward incidents count only so far 
as they cause the ebb and flow of purpose within. It 
is this which, as Schiller 1 thought, disqualified Iphigenie 
for representation on the stage ; though he frankly 
admitted his inability to remedy it without destroying 

1 See his letter to Goethe of January 22, 1802. 



GERMANY. 235 

the whole force and beauty of the poem. It is this 
also which, as Goethe himself wa,s aware, sets an 
impassable barrier between Iphigenie and the Greek 
Drama, by which it was influenced so deeply ; in par- 
ticular, between it and the play of Euripides, from 
which its outward incidents are mainly taken. There 
are few dramas in which action, if by action we under- 
stand incident, plays so small a part; few in which 
the interest of the moral conflict or the pathos are so 
great. The pathos of the closing scene in especial — 
that in which the heroine wrings a friendly parting 
from the benefactor she could not bring herself to 
betray — is hardly to be equalled. 

The play closes, as is fitting, on the note of calm 
which gives character to the whole. And it is just 
this that Goethe, like Milton, had in common with the 
classical dramatists. It is this that, when the ferment 
of youth was once passed, had drawn him to classical 
art. 1 It is this that he in turn drew from the classical 
artists. In moral sentiment, in the inwardness of its 
dramatic method, Iphigenie, no doubt, stands in marked 
contrast with the classical Drama. But the contrast 
of treatment and of method only serves to throw out 
more clearly the community of spirit. It is no 
mechanical copy of an ancient model that Goethe 
attempted, but a subtle transfusion of imaginative 
temper and ideal. In the earlier drafts of the play 

1 Even from the first, it was as much in the name of true classi- 
cism as of romance that he waged war against the false classicism of 
the Augustans. See his curious skit, Gotter, Helden und.Wieland 

(1774). 



236 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

this transfusion is still exceedingly imperfect: it is 
only through the medium of verse that it was, or 
could be, adequately carried out. 

The two remaining poems, The Roman Elegies (1790) 
and Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1797), 1 bring us 
Roman Elegies to another aspect — or rather to two differ- 
Tho^tr 1 ' ent > but closely connected, aspects — of 
pflanzen. that which Goethe owed to the influence 

of classical art. The former is lyrical in character, 
the latter is the earliest of Goethe's attempts to give 
poetic expression to his thoughts on natural science 
and the side of religion which abuts upon it. For 
these reasons it was subsequently incorporated in 
the collection of poems known as Gott und Welt 
which, if we except parts of the second Faust, con- 
tains the noblest and deepest poetry of his closing 
years. 

Common to both poems, besides the classical metre, 
is the power of presenting the raw material — emotion 
in the one case, a chain of scientific reasoning in the 
other — under the most concrete and vivid imagery ; if 
imagery it can be called, which is simply the outward 
and visible working of the inward feelings and pro- 
cesses that the poet has set himself to render. And 
this plastic power, this genius for seeing things in the 
"dry light " of the imagination, Goethe persistently 
attributes to the influence of classical art, and, in 
particular, to his loving study of the Latin elegists. 

1 The prose treatise of the same title belongs to 1791. And this 
must serve as an excuse for the inclusion of the poem under this 
period. 



GERMANY. 237 

Applied to subjects so different, it was natural that this 
method should yield widely different results. Fine 
as they are, it may fairly be objected to the Eoman 
Elegies that they lack — and, given the method, it was 
inevitable that they should lack — the inwardness and 
the passion of Goethe's earlier love-poetry. In the 
Metamorphose, on the other hand, such qualities could 
under no circumstances have found place. The power 
of seeing, among the multiplicity of facts, exactly 
those which, to the trained eye, bear on the face of 
them the working of the law within; the power of 
presenting these simply and directly ; the power of 
making them, as so presented, speak for themselves 
and, as it were, carry out before our very eyes the 
most secret processes of nature — this was here the 
one thing needful. And to this Goethe brought 
the open vision, the faculty for seeing the object 
before him, neither less nor more, which he had 
perfected in the school of ancient art and in the 
land where these things still lingered as a great 
tradition. 

To what perfection he had carried this faculty may 
best be seen by comparing Die Metamorphose der 

„ „ „ Pflanzen with The Loves of the Plants by 

Goethe and J J J 

Erasmus Erasmus Darwin, published a few years 
earlier (1789), and now remembered chiefly 
by the scathing parody in the Anti- Jacobin. Con- 
trast the simplicity and directness of Goethe with 
the mealy-mouthed allusiveness and the frigid per- 
sonifications of Darwin, and we have a measure of 
the gulf which separates true poetry in such mat- 



238 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ters from false and pretentious tinsel. 1 And the 
contrast becomes yet more significant, when we re- 
member that Goethe's theme was in itself, and in 
less skilful hands would inevitably have remained, 
far more abstract than Darwin's. The latter con- 
fines himself to that side of the subject in which 
the analogy between the merely physical process and 
the life of man is closest, and which, for that reason, 
most obviously lends itself to poetic purposes. Goethe, 
on the other hand, boldly takes the whole story of 
evolution in plant-life for his theme. And, thanks 
to his genius for seizing the type through the indi- 
vidual, the process in the finished work, his poem is 
full of movement. It appeals not merely to the in- 
tellect, but to the eye and the imagination. 

It is from this period that we may fairly date 
Goethe's devotion to the systematic study of natural 
Goethe as man science. During the last three or four 
of science. years f ^is life at Weimar 2 he had felt 
himself more and more drawn to these subjects, — 
mineralogy, botany, and osteology being those which 
attracted him the most. And early in 1784 he had 
made the discovery, that of the intermaxillary 



1 The following is a not unfair specimen : — 

"Two brother swains of Collin's gentle name, 
The same their features and their forms the same, 
With rival love for fair Collinia sigh, 
Knit the dark brow and roll the unsteady eye. 
With sweet concern the pitying Beauty mourns, 
And soothes with smiles the jealous pair by turns." 

— Loves of the Plants, canto i. 

2 Roughly, from 1782. See his letter to Knebel of November 21, 
in that year. 



GEKMANY. 239 

bone in man, which forms so important a link 
in the doctrine of human evolution, and on which 
his fame as man of science is largely based. 1 But it 
was in Italy that the passion of natural science seems 
first to have taken full possession of him. And it 
was in the years immediately following his return 
from Italy that he was most completely absorbed in 
it. The light which his scientific aims and methods 
throw on his poetry is deeply significant; and it is 
mainly for that reason that they fall to be considered 
in the present work. 

The method which he seems habitually to have 
followed in these matters was one of empirical in- 
spection. He prided himself on having 

His 7/ictJiods 

no preconceived ideas, no " system " to 
support. And such was the keenness of his eye, his 
power of divining the inner law in the outward 
phenomenon, that in his hands the method — perilous 
in itself, and, in the more abstract matter which forms 
the subject of the Farbenlehre, admittedly disastrous — 
yielded astonishing results. It enabled him to antici- 
pate the professors, much to their chagrin, in more 
than one discovery of the first moment ; and, what 
was yet more important, to retain that sense of unity 
in the infinite diversity of nature which the more 
technical inquirer is so apt to lose. 

Among the many qualities necessary to the full 
equipment of the man of science, there are two 
which in Goethe are blended to a degree rarely, if 

1 See his letters to Frau v. Stein of March 27, April 13, June 27, 
1784, 



240 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ever, to be found in other men : an intense appre- 
hension of the individual object on the one 

And ideas. M 

hand; an equally intense apprehension ol 
the universal, as working in and through the indi- 
vidual, upon the other. At times, in what might be 
taken for a vein of pure empiricism, he mocks at the 
pedantry which calls on the naturalist to " renounce 
his five senses " and " have nothing to do with the 
living conception of things." 1 At other times, in a 
spirit which might have been that of Plato, he finds 
the pure idea of the horse visibly embodied in the 
noble frieze of the Parthenon, and is confident that he 
has discovered the invisible archetype of all plants as 
he observes and handles the rich vegetation of the 
south. 2 More often, however, his view comes nearer 
to that of Spinoza, who, of all philosophers, had the 
deepest influence upon him. "The more we learn 
of individual things, the more we learn of God" — 
a view as alien to the materialist temper as it is 
to the Platonic, and alien to each because it strives 
to reconcile both — is the watchword of Spinoza. It 
is the watchword also of Goethe. A few sentences 
from the Italienische Beise will show how, inter- 
woven with a more Platonist tendency, it yet served 
as the clue to all his scientific investigations. "At 
the sight of this wealth of forms," he writes to 
Herder, " the old whim recurred to my mind : Amid 

1 See letter to Merck of April 8, 1785. 

2 Compare what he says about the "Urthier," t. xxxii., p. 10. 
It is curious that Schiller's scepticism as to the " Urpflanze " came 
near to breaking off the friendship of the two men, at the very be- 
ginning. Annalen, year 1794. 



GERMANY. 241 

this host of plant - forms, could I not discover the 
archetypal plant ? Such a thing there must be ; for 
why recognise this or that form as a plant, unless 
they were all formed after one pattern ? . . . The 
archetypal plant is the most wonderful thing in the 
world; nature herself might envy me the discovery of 
it. With this model, and the key to it, it is possible 
to discover new plants to infinity. And such plants 
would be logically possible. That is, they would be 
such as might exist, even if they do not ; and exist, 
not as picturesque and poetic fictions, but as having 
an inner necessity and truth. v So far, we might be 
listening to a Platonist. The words that follow bring 
us back to the concrete and individual. "It had 
dawned upon me that the organ of plant-life in which 
the true Proteus lies concealed is that which we are 
used to call the leaf. It is the leaf which hides, and 
yet reveals, itself in every stage of growth. Trace it 
forwards or backwards, the plant is never anything 
but the leaf." 1 

Here was a principle at once concrete and ideal, 
— a principle which kept his eye steadily on the in- 

„ . _ dividual object, and yet drove him to 

Bearing of ° ' J 

these on his look through that outward object to the 
working of a vital force within. And 
seizing as he did with the instinct of genius upon 
the most vital of all the processes which blend in 
the living organism, the process of growth, he was 
able to apply the law which he discerned in it, 
the law of development, to all the other fields of 

1 Italienische Reise, t. xx., pp. 71, 72 (April 17, May 17, 1787). 

Q 



242 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

natural science ; to animal life no less than to the 
life of plants ; to the formation of crystals no less 
than to the evolution of the body of man. And, 
however various the manifestation, he was for ever 
haunted by a sense of the unity of the plastic power 
which works behind it; the unity which binds all 
nature into one living whole; the unity which man 
conceives to himself — which Goethe, at any rate, 
learned more and more to conceive to himself — as 
coming from God. It is in the later poems, in those 
which fall either almost or altogether beyond the 
scope of the present work, that this conception finds 
its most imaginative expression ; in the collection 
called Gott und Welt, the greater part of which be- 
longs to the last twenty, or indeed to the last twelve, 
years of his life ; above all, in the opening hymn, 
Im Namen dessert der sich selbst erschuf, which was 
written in 1816, and which represents the high-water 
mark of this side of his genius. 1 

The main thing, however, to notice in this field of 
his activity is the inseparable bond which, alike to his 
intellect and his imagination, existed between the 
particular and the universal; his absolute refusal to 
regard the individual except in the light of the general 
law which it reveals, the vital principle except in and 
through the individual which visibly embodies it. This 
was the secret of his achievement, as man of science. 

1 The song of the Earth-spirit, however, must be ranked with the 
greatest of these poems ; and it was written probably as early as 
1774. Weltseele belongs to 1804, Eins und AUcs to 1823, Venndcht- 
niss to 1829. 



GERMANY. 243 

It was largely also the secret of his greatness, as 
poet. Few poets are so concrete, few have taken 
up so much of the common stuff of life into their 
poetry. Yet the common always ceases to be com- 
mon in his hands \ and however concrete the matter, 
it is always touched and softened by the golden 
light which is shed around it by the poet. In his 
imaginative, as in his scientific, work he has the 
instinct for hinting the ideal through the particular ; 
he has spells for making us see "the translucence 
of the general in the special." And this Coleridge 
held to be, of all imaginative faculties, that which 
is the most essential and the highest. 

III. (1794-1805.) During the years which followed 
his return from Italy, Goethe had buried himself more 
Friendship an( l more in the study of nature. It was 
with schiiier. intercourse with Schiller that brought him 
back to his native element of poetry ; that "gave me," 
as he wrote a few years later, " a second youth and 
made me once more, what I had as good as ceased 
to be, a poet/' x The strange thing is that, in the 
literary partnership which resulted, it was the lesser, 
not the greater, poet who contributed the more to 
the common stock ; that, as the correspondence abun- 
dantly testifies, it was not Schiller, but Goethe, who 
owed most, at any rate in detail, to the alliance. 

The least attractive fruit of this memorable friend- 
ship, and one of the earliest, is to be found 

Xenien. 

in the Xenien, a collection of epigrams 
on matters literary and philosophical, which was, in 

1 Letter to Schiller of Jan. 17, 1798. 



244 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the strictest sense, the joint work of the two poets. 1 
The design suggested itself to Goethe at the end of 
1795; it was eagerly taken up by Schiller, and the 
two worked busily at their game of mischief during 
the first half of 1796. The literary skill and bril- 
liance of these pieces is often very great. But it 
may be doubted whether a great writer ever does 
well to attack his brethren of the craft. And, in 
the case of Goethe, the inevitable consequence was 
to widen that gulf between him and the public which 
was the source of so much that goes to weaken his 
later work. 

Apart from the Xenien, which from their nature 
made more stir than they were intrinsically worth, 
the chief works of this period were Wilhelm Meisters 
Lehrjahre (1796), Hermann und Dorothea (1797), the 
Ballads (1797), and Die Natilrliche Tochter (1803). 
To these may be added Faust, the first part of which, 
though not published in its present form till 1808, 
was practically completed during these years ; while, 
before the first part was finished, the second was 
already begun. 

With the exception of Faust, there is none of 
wiiheim Goethe's works which lay so long on the 
Meister. anv il as Wilhelm Meister. The begin- 
nings of the Eomance go back as far as 1777 ; the 

1 The brunt of the assault fell upon Nicolai and the Philistines ; 
upon Reichardt and the " apostles of freedom " ; upon Goethe's 
scientific opponents ; upon Friedrich Schlegel, who had spoken dis- 
respectfully of Schiller's Horen ; and upon the Stolbergs, who had 
already betrayed the Catholic leanings which later declared them- 
selves among the Romantics, as a body. See Goethegeselhchaft, t. viii. 



GERMANY. 245 

first conception (" kotyledonartig ") probably to the 
preceding year. For the next nine or ten years, 
particularly in those immediately before the Italian 
journey, it was constantly present to his imagination, 
and, in some shape or other, was apparently written 
to the extent of about half its present length. It 
is mentioned, but as a task for the future, in the 
course of that journey. It was again taken up in 
earnest shortly before the beginning of Goethe's in- 
timacy with Schiller. And it was completed, with 
insistent reference to Schiller's advice and criticism, 
during the first two years of their friendship. 1 

It was hardly in the nature of things that a 

book, written over so long a time, should have the 

unity which we look for in a work of 

Its aims. ... . 

imagination. And it is easy to see that 
Goethe's purpose at the end was not what it was 
at the beginning. When he first set himself to the 
task, his main interest lay in the attempts then 
making on every hand, and nowhere more than at 
Weimar itself, to create a national theatre for Ger- 
many. In a minor degree, it lay with the various 
secret societies, Freemasons' and others, which in 
the general disintegration preceding the Eevolution 
were making themselves felt here and there through- 
out western Europe. There were, moreover, the 
difficulties which Goethe himself had been called 
on to face in his change from burgher life to the 
aristocratic surroundings of a court, and which, for 
purely personal reasons, tended to bulk extravagantly 

1 See in particular Schiller's letters of July 2, 3, aud 5, 1796. 



246 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

large in his judgment and imagination. In the latter 
part of the Komance these things, if we except the 
secret society and its mummeries, have faded into the 
background. Their place is taken by the deeper 
issues of art and its bearing upon life, by all that 
makes for the growth of individual character, by the 
discipline of action, education, and religion. The 
butterfly actresses, the toy counts and barons, of the 
earlier part give way to impassioned sentimentalists, 
to " beautiful souls," to cold-blooded men, and manag- 
ing women, of the world. The dramatis personae are 
almost entirely different at the end from what they 
were at the beginning. The story is held together by 
nothing stronger than the character of the hero — who, 
as one of the personages remarks with engaging frank- 
ness, "has no character at all" — and the shadowy 
figures of Mignon and the Harper. 

The wonder is that Goethe should have been able 

to conceal these inherent defects as skilfully as he 

has, and that, with blemishes so obvious, 

Its stronger ' ■ 

and weaker the story should still retain, as it does 
retain, its hold upon the reader. That it 
does so is partly due to the halo of poetry and pathos 
which surrounds Mignon, partly to the interest with 
which a wise man must always be followed when 
he lets us into the secret of his ripest thoughts on 
subjects of such importance. Therese and Natalie, 
who (Philine excepted) are the only substantial char- 
acters of the book, clearly embody Goethe's ideal of 
two types of womanhood, and they interest the reader 
at least as much on that account as for the part 



GERMANY. 247 

they play in the economy of the story. They are 
hardly less a mirror of his opinions on life than 
the discussions on Hamlet, earlier in the story, are 
of his opinions about art. 

In one sense, this is a condemnation of the book. 
And nothing, it may fairly be held, can excuse either 
the slenderness of the story or the weakness of the 
character round which it is supposed to centre. Every- 
thing, in fact, is sacrificed to the inner history of the 
hero, which is really a blurred and one-sided reflection 
of the inner history of the author. Outward incidents 
there are, and of the most motley nature. But they 
are obviously inserted to keep up the spirits of the 
reader; they have little or no relation to the real 
theme of the romance. And not even Goethe's theory 
of the Novel and its functions — the "picaresque" 
theory, too manifestly furbished up for the occasion * 
— can persuade us to the contrary. Compare Wilhelm 
with the two supreme picaresque novels of the cen- 
tury — compare it with Gil Bias or Tom Jones. In 
both of these the incidents may be too loosely strung 
for modern taste. But at least they are of the essence 
of the design ; at least they are of enthralling interest 
in themselves, and serve, as nothing else could have 
done, to bring into clear light the respective characters 
of the heroes. None of these merits can be claimed 
for the incidents of Wilhelm. They stand quite apart 
from the main thread of the story; they throw little 
light on its characters, and the reader takes but a 
languid interest in the pranks played upon a half- 

1 Wilhelm Meister, Book. iv. chap. vii. 



248 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

crazy Count or the throes of a knock-kneed Coelebs 
in search of his son. 

The next work of importance, Hermann und Doro- 
thea, is far less open to dispute. With Faust, 
Hermann und Iphigenie, and the greater lyrics, it may 
Dorothea. j^ rec k one cl among the most perfect 
efforts of his genius. Here, once again, he employs 
a classical metre ; this time the hexameters on which 
he had already tried his hand in his " profane Bible," 
Reineke Fuchs (1793). In Hermann this is far more 
delicately handled than in the earlier poem; and 
Goethe himself admits that he had learnt much 
from the Luise of Voss (1795). 1 Whether any skill 
could suffice to adapt the Homeric instrument to 
a language so rebellious in "quantity" and so over- 
laden with consonants as the German is a serious 
question. And if in any point Hermann is assailable, 
it is undoubtedly on the score of metre. In choice 
of incident and management of the story, in the 
vividness of the characters and their outward setting, 
above all, in its profound humanity and pure, steady 

1 Annalen, year 1793. Luise, the best known and the best of 
Voss's Idylls, might fairly be described as the raw material of 
Hermann. It gives a picture — vivid, accurate and attractive — of 
all that endears the home-life of the Germans to those who are 
fortunate enough to know it. All this Goethe takes and, by his 
genius, raises to a higher power. The most important of Voss's 
other works is his translation of Homer in hexameters ; the Odyssey 
in 1781, the Iliad, with the Odyssey recast (in the opinion of most 
judges spoiled, certainly roughened), in 1793. His later years were 
embittered by an angry strife with the Romantics, in which the 
chief episode was his unblessed attack on Stolberg, who had been 
his most intimate friend, after his conversion to Catholicism : Wie 
wird Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier? (1819). 



GERMANY. 249 

glow of style, it has a place entirely by itself in 
modern literature. 

The subject, as Goethe says, is such as a poet " does 
not find twice in a lifetime " ; x so full of life and 
colour, so complete in itself, and yet so 
rich in glimpses of the hard world of wars 
and tumults which lies beyond. It is significant 
that the background, which in the first instance 
presented the migration of Protestant refugees in 
the time of Frederick the Great, was deliberately 
shifted by Goethe to the flight of the Ehinelanders 
before the armies of revolutionary France. The 
change was clearly made with a double object : 
to appeal more directly to the forebodings of the 
moment, and to replace a comparatively trivial out- 
look by one opening straight on the greatest issues 
of modern history. This was a concession — such as 
Goethe rarely made — to the political movement of his 
time, and no one can doubt that the poem, alike in 
detail and in general effect, gained immeasurably by 
the alteration. On this dark background of tragedy 
and passion Goethe has painted one of the sunniest 
pictures that ever rose before the imagination of a 
poet. The little town with the typical figures of its 
thriving burghers, the first spring of love in the 
youth's heart, his sudden resolve, his father's harsh- 
ness and the tenderness of his mother, the ready help- 
fulness of the stranger girl, her rapid decision, her 
outburst of honest indignation when she believes her- 
self insulted, her willingness to pardon when she 

1 Letter to Heinrich Meyer, April 28, 1797. 



250 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

learns the truth, the new sense of strength and con- 
fidence which she, like her lover, draws from the 
sudden bond thus knit between them, — these are 
some, and some only, of the touches by which 
Goethe wrought out the mellow harmonies of his 
fresco. Never since the days of Werther had he 
worked so swiftly, or with such easy mastery of his 
matter. In none of his writings, if we except 
Iphigenie, is the unity of tone so triumphantly pre- 
served from beginning to end. 

The English poems with which we instinctively 

compare Hermann und Dorothea are the Story of 

^ mM Margaret and Michael, both of which were 

Compared with ° 

wordswortKs written within a few years — the former, 
perhaps, in the very year — of Goethe's 
masterpiece. But the contrast is far greater than the 
resemblance. In Hermann the Idyll rises almost to 
the flight of an epic. In the Pastorals it approaches 
more nearly to tragedy. In the former we have a 
wide landscape — cornland, orchard, vineyard — lit by 
a level sun from beneath a stormy bank of cloud. 
In the latter, a bleak upland valley, strewn with 
desolate rocks and lighted only by the stars. The one 
is bright with the ruddy glow of a summer sunset ; 
the other is darkness, relieved only by the inner light 
of endurance and unconquerable love. 

To the same year as Hermann belong the two 

ballads, Die Braut von Korinth and Der Gott und die 

Bajadere, written in friendly rivalry with 

Der Taucher and other ballads of Schiller. 

Nothing could well be greater than the difference 



GERMANY. 251 

between the ballads of this and of the earlier period. 
Erlkonig, Der Sanger, Der Konig in Thule proclaim 
themselves of the stock of popular poetry. They are 
charged with subtle echoes of the universal instincts 
of men and remote memories of the past. The two 
later ballads, whatever may be the source of their out- 
ward incidents, have at bottom nothing in common 
with this. The setting of both is doubtless romantic. 
Each of them has an ample touch of the supernatural. 
But the real inspiration of each is drawn from the per- 
sonal temper of the poet, from his reasoned hatred of 
asceticism and his deliberate faith in the redeeming 
power of love. The change of spirit is fitly reflected 
in the style, from which the popular note is conspic- 
uously absent. Die Braut, in particular, is full of 
effects elaborately prepared, of mysterious suggestions 
which bear more than a faint analogy to those of 
Christabel. Apart, however, from such questions of 
affinity, the two ballads have a place apart among the 
poems of Goethe. On the smaller scale they represent 
that perfection of narrative power which Hermann 
had already shown in large. And they have a depth 
of passion which neither Hermann nor any other of 
the narrative poems can be said to have approached. 

During the next five years Goethe published little 
or nothing of importance. Much of his time was taken 
up with the importunate Farbenlehre, and various 
pieces of criticism embodied in Propylaen. He was 
also busied with the Achilleis and with Faust, 

Die Natilrliche Tochter, which marks his decisive 
return to poetry, was written between the end of 



252 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

1800 and 1803 ; and, contrary to Goethe's usual prac- 
Natiiriiche tice, it was begun and ended in the deepest 
Tochter. secrecy. The remaining two pieces of the 
trilogy which he had designed on the subject were 
never more than sketched ; and this play remains his 
one serious endeavour to give poetic form to the great 
issues stirred by the Eevolution. In that respect 
it is no more successful than his other attempts to 
idealise a historical subject. Here, as always, it is 
the personal element which alone appeals to his 
imagination. Even on this side it will probably be 
felt that his hand has, in this instance, lost some- 
thing of its cunning. The incidents which bring 
about the catastrophe are too vaguely indicated; 
the characters themselves are vaguely drawn, and 
seem to be types rather than individuals. There 
is the unscrupulous courtier, the pliant ecclesiastic, 
the feebly resisting Hofmeisterin, the chivalrous coun- 
cillor who comes forward as a friend in need to save 
the heroine from the fate to which her enemies have 
condemned her. All these are little more than 
shadows, phantom figures moving through a dream 
of which the clue is carefully concealed from the 
spectators. The only personage of any substance, 
as the only one who enjoys the privilege of a 
proper name, is Eugenie; and even she is idealised 
to the very farthest point compatible with reality. 
In spite of these drawbacks, the play, like almost 
everything else that Goethe wrote, has a strange 
interest of its own. But it betrays, and is perhaps 
the earliest of his works which can be said de- 



GERMANY. 253 

cisively to betray, that deliberate haziness of touch 
which reaches its climax in the " phantasmagoria " 
of the second part of Faust. Here, moreover, as in 
that crowning instance, the poet is hampered to 
some extent by the attempt to combine an essen- 
tially romantic subject with the typical forms of 
the classical drama. And it is hardly surprising 
that, in the face of this and other inherent diffi- 
culties, as well as from the coolness with which 
the first part of the trilogy was received by Herder 
and others, Goethe should tacitly, but most reluct- 
antly, have dropped the completion of his original 
design. 1 

A review of Goethe's poetic activity fitly closes 

with a notice of Faust. This, the most famous and 

surely the greatest of all his works, was 

Faust. . . 

his lifelong companion. It seems to have 
begun as early as 1770 ; and it was not completed, if 
indeed it can be said ever to have been completed, 
until a few weeks before his death. No other of his 
writings reflects so completely either the growth of 
his spiritual ideals or the changes through which 
he passed as a poet. The opening scenes and the 
story of Gretchen, which belong for the most part 
to the earlier '70's, embalm the passionate longings 
and questionings of his youth ; the earlier scenes of 
the second part render, with grave satire, the ripest 
experience of his manhood and middle life ; the later 
scenes bring us face to face with the unresting lab- 
ours and the mellow tolerance of the Indian summer 

1 Annalen, year 1803. 



254 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

at the close. In the same way the first part gives 
us the romantic impulse which was the strongest in- 
spiration of the years preceding the Italian journey. 
The episode of Helena represents, though with many 
counter-currents, the classical influence which domin- 
ated the next twenty years of his life. Finally, in 
the closing act, we return to a softened echo of the 
romantic music of his youth. 

Without going into minute detail, it should be added 

that the bulk of the first part was completed before the 

journey to Italy ; though it is significant 

Its composition. ° J . 

that it is precisely the most " romantic " 
scenes — Faust's attempt at self-destruction, the Easter 
hymn, the very compact with Mephistopheles 1 — 
which were composed the latest. Of the second part, 
it would appear that the scene between Mephistopheles 
and the Baccalaureus, parts of the third act (Helena) 
and perhaps the opening scene of the first act, the 
awakening of Faust, were composed first: all these 
before the end of the century. And it is certain 
that the fourth act, which is undoubtedly the weakest 
part of the whole drama, was written last. As to 
publication, it need only be mentioned that the first 
part, with the exception of certain scenes mostly 
indicated above, was published as a "fragment" in 

1 All these seem to have been written after 1790. It was at Rome, 
of all places in the world, that the Hexenkiiche was composed (spring 
of 1788). The earliest known version of Faust is that discovered (in 
1887) among papers once belonging to Fraulein v. Gochhausen, maid 
of honour at the Weimar Court. It is supposed to be a copy of the 
text as brought by Goethe from Frankfurt in 1775. See the Weimar 
edition of Goethe's Werke, t. 39. 



GERMANY. 255 

1790 ; that it was reissued, as completed with 
Dedication, Prelude, Prologue, and the rest, in 1808 ; 
that Helena was put forth as a separate poem in 
1827; and that the second part was published as 
a whole, after the poet's death, in 1832. 

The theme of the drama, it need hardly be said, is 
the legend of the man who sells his soul to the devil. 

The Faust It is the legend which had fascinated the 
legend. imagination of Christendom from the sixth 
century to the time of Lessing ; the legend which, in 
one form, had been treated by Marlowe and the 
German Faustbitch in the sixteenth century ; and, in 
another form, by Euteboeuf (Miracle de Thtfophile) in 
the thirteenth century, and by Calderon (El Magico 
Prodigioso) in the seventeenth. Of these versions the 
Faust of Goethe may be described as a fusion. With 
him, as with Marlowe, the compact is prompted by 
despair. With him, as with Marlowe, it carries 
defiance, complete and absolute, of the Almighty. 
But, as with Calderon, a door of repentance is left 
open. In love and in the service of men Faust finds 
the forgiveness which the scoffing spirit reckoned to 
be for ever forfeited. By this change something, no 
doubt, is lost to the imaginative effect. There is 
nothing in Faust to compare with the appalling force 
of the closing scene in Marlowe. But on the whole 
the gain is such as more than to compensate for the 
inevitable sacrifice. The conception of Goethe will 
seem to most minds more satisfying than that of 
Marlowe. And the final pardon of Faust, his wel- 
come by the spirit of Margaret, is, in its own kind 



256 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

no less impressive to the imagination, and it is no 
less impressively worked out by the poet, than the 
heartrending despair of Faustus. 

In describing the general scope of the drama, it 
has been necessary to lay stress on the second part. 
It is the first part, however, which has always been 
justly reckoned the greater achievement, and it is 
with the first part that we are here mainly con- 
cerned. What are the qualities which make it the 
most representative of Goethe's works ? What are 
the qualities which have given it a unique place 
among modern poems? 

The fascination of the legend itself, the romantic 
appeal of the whole story, must doubtless be held to 
Goethe's hand- count for much. But that is not all; nor is 
ung of u. jjj even t^ g rea ter part. It may have been, 
and probably was, this that first drew Goethe to the 
subject. But, as we have seen, it was just the most 
romantic incidents of the story that he was slowest 
to take in hand. It was clearly the human side of the 
poem that stirred his imagination the most deeply. It 
is the human side of it that has stamped itself most 
indelibly upon the imagination of his readers; the 
weariness of knowledge which comes on man, as he 
beats his wings against the inexorable limits of his 
powers ; his struggles to force his way behind the 
surface of nature to her life and heart; his craving 
to change the "grey" life of thought for the stir of 
action and of love, — these are the things which give 
the pulse of life to the first part of the drama ; these, 
and the tragic tale of love and despair, to which they 



GERMANY. 257 

naturally give birth. Here the execution is as power- 
ful as the conception ; and this is as true of the earlier 
scenes, which paint the spiritual anguish of Faust and 
his vain efforts to break the barriers of man's reason, 
as it is of the later scenes which tell the yet more 
human tale of reckless passion and its miserable 
end. Nothing is more surprising than that the same 
hand which wrote the one should also have written 
the other, — that the genius which conceived and gave 
imaginative form to the worldly wisdom and the 
poignant intellectual experience of the opening scenes 
should also have been capable of the tenderness and 
passion of the close. In the former, there is hardly 
a line which has not passed, and deserved to pass, 
into a proverb ; while the latter is at once the truest 
and the simplest poem on the eternal theme of love 
that has been written since Shakespeare. 

Fault has sometimes been found with Goethe for 
interweaving material so homely as a love - story 
ms mdness in with the magic web of the Christian 
recasting it. legend. In fact this, or rather the courage 
which prompted this and other changes, was the secret 
of his triumph. The legend came to him clogged with 
a train of thought and feeling wholly alien to the 
modern spirit. And it was a true instinct which 
led him to recast it from top to bottom; to retain 
only the bare groundwork of the original fabric, and 
to fill it in with themes drawn straight from the 
vital experience of his own day, or from those pas- 
sions which remain the same from one generation 
to another. In truth, it is exactly where he re- 
ft 



258 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

casts most boldly that he strikes home most closely 
to the heart and the imagination. What is it 
that has made Faust the best known and loved of 
all modern poems ? It is the loves of Faust and 
Gretchen; it is the mockery of Mephistopheles ; it 
is the despair of Faust, his bitter sense of the innate 
impotence of man's reason, the emptiness of all that 
man, in his folly, counts as knowledge. No one of 
these is, in anything more than name, to be found 
in the original legend. All are, in the strictest sense, 
the creation of Goethe. They breathe the spirit of 
the time in which his own lot was cast. They reflect 
his own outlook upon life ; his own reading of the 
forces that hem man in from without, of the weakness 
that cripples him from within, of the strength by which, 
if it be wisely sought, these may be met and overcome. 
As he had dealt with the classical theme in Iphigenie, 
so he deals with the romantic theme in Faust. He 
remoulds it freely to his own purpose ; he humanises 
it ; he handles it not as an antiquarian, but as a poet 
and a modern. 

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in his 
conception of Mephistopheles. Here, if anywhere, 

His cation the P° et iS fiankl y human ' Here > aS ln 

o/MepMs- the love-story, he rises to the full height 
of his powers. Goethe's evil spirit has 
not the majesty of Milton's, nor the sombre melan- 
choly of Marlowe's. But, as an incarnation of mockery 
and cynicism, as " the spirit who incessantly denies," 
he is no less impressive ; he stands nearer to man, 
and, for that reason, he lends himself more readily 



GERMANY. 259 

to dramatic treatment. The tempter of Milton, 
and in a less degree of Marlowe, lays his train 
from without. Mephistopheles is a perpetual echo of 
all that is base and trivial in the soul within ; a 
shadow cast from the undying levity which haunts 
the inmost recesses of man's heart ; a ghastly double 
of the worser self which refracts and distorts each 
fresh experience that confronts us. Eeason, love, 
despair, humanity itself — each in turn is poisoned 
and perverted by the voice of cynical mockery, which 
only puts into words the barren doubt, the reckless 
selfishness, that whispers within. Throughout the 
first part of the drama the character is sustained with 
unflagging spirit. In the second part, Mephistopheles, 
like the Satan of Paradise Lost, fades into the back- 
ground ; and after the scene with the Baccalaureus, 
he is not himself again until the moment when he 
finds himself cheated of his prey. But, if we look 
only at the first part, we must allow that he is one 
of the most daring creations in the whole range 
of poetry ; and he gives a unity to the necessarily 
broken lights of the poem which, without him, would 
infallibly be lacking. 

The second part of Faust barely falls within our 
scope, and a summary account of it is all that can 
second part be attempted. That a continuation of 
of Faust. some sort was necessary to the first part 
is obvious enough. Whether the continuation actually 
wrought out by Goethe is such as to satisfy the im- 
agination is another matter. Few poems are made 
up of episodes so ill-assorted ; few are so unequal in 



260 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

their general effect. The appearance of Faust and 
Mephistopheles at the Emperor's court, the satire on 
paper money, the apparition of Helen, the war of the 
rival Caesars and the general scramble for wealth in 
which it ends — all these are little better than a weari- 
ness ; and one could wish that Goethe had never 
laboured at what one may suspect to have been so 
uncongenial a task. On the other hand, the awak- 
ening of Faust in the opening scene, his descent to 
the throne of the mysterious Mothers in quest of 
Helen, the interview between Mephistopheles and the 
boisterous graduate which immediately follows, and 
finally the whole of the last act x — the beneficent toil 
of Faust and his fatal outburst of impatience, the 
invasion of his palace by Care and the three sister 
shadows, the digging of his grave, his vain craving to 
stay the shadow on the dial and win a brief respite 
for his labours on behalf of others, his death and the 
dismay of the tempter when the soul he has toiled 
through years to win is borne upward by the angels, 
the welcome of Faust's spirit among the penitent and 
the ransomed with which the drama closes ; here, if 
anywhere, the genius of Goethe rises to the full 
measure of its stature ; and in the poetry of the last 
three centuries there is little greater. 

That the second part lacks the reality of the first, 
that throughout — and nowhere more than in the 
scenes just mentioned — Goethe adopts the method of 
suggestion and symbolism, is no valid objection. As 

1 In its present form this seems to have been written 1825-27. 
But 'there is little doubt that there was an earlier version. 



GERMANY. 261 

Schiller clearly saw, the way of symbolism was forced 
on him by the very nature of his subject, 1 The only 
alternative would have been to leave the subject en- 
tirely alone. And who would be pedant enough to 
desire so desperate a cure ? 

The other works of Goethe's old age — Die Wahlver- 
wandschaften (1808), Der West-ostlicher Divan (1818), 
the Sprilche in Beimen und Prosa (most of which be- 
long to later years), lie beyond our limits. Nothing 
has been said of his unique autobiography ; 2 nothing 
of his translations ; nothing of his criticism. 

Of the translations, those of Le Neveu de Bameau 

(1805) — his version of this was for some time the 

only form in which that amazing " human 

Goethe q.s critic 

document" was accessible to the public 3 
— and of Cellini's Autobiography (1796-97) are the 
most notable, and they serve to mark the width 
and keenness of his sympathies. Criticism, though 
a lifelong interest, remained until the closing period 
more or less in the background. During the last 
dozen years of his life, however, his critical activity 
was enormous. In an age of literary ferment few 
were the writings, at any rate of the Continent, 
which escaped his notice. The popular poetry of 
the Slavs, the Spaniards, the Lithuanians, and the 
modern Greeks ; Manzoni, Hugo, Quinet, Merimee, 

1 Schiller's letter to. Goethe of June 23, 1797. 

2 Wahrheit und Dichtung aus meinem Leben. The first 15 books 
were published 1811-14 ; the remainder after his death. 

3 See Goethe's statement of the circumstances, together with the 
letter of M. Briere, the editor of the French original (1823) in Werke, 
t. xxv., pp. 290-302. 



262 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Guizot, Cousin ; nay, far beyond the limits of 
Europe, the poetry of the Indians, the Persians, the 
Chinese, — all, at least for the moment, riveted his 
attention ; for all he had a word of welcome and of 
discriminating appreciation. To British writers his 
ear was less readily open. Of all those who made the 
glory of that epoch, three only — Byron, Scott, Carlyle 
— seem to have arrested him, and, in different ways, 
they were the most cosmopolitan of their race. This 
comparative neglect of our literature is the more 
strange, seeing that in earlier days he had owed so 
much to it, and not least to such eminently native 
products as Tristram Shandy, Tom Jones, and The 
Vicar of Wakefield. This exception apart, it is hardly 
an exaggeration to say that he followed the literary 
movement of the whole world. No other poet, few 
critics by profession, can have kept so wide or keen 
an outlook. 

What is yet more important is the spirit in which 
the critic went about his work. What this was, is 
best shown by the following sentences in his notice 
of the Quarterly Keviewer's article on Manzoni's 
Carmagnola (1821) : " Criticism may be either destruc- 
tive or productive. The former is uncommonly easy. 
The critic has only to set up a standard or pattern in 
his own mind, and then roundly assert that the work 
in question does not conform to it and is consequently 
worthless. . . . Productive criticism is a far harder 
task. The question it asks is : What did the author 
propose to himself? is the purpose a just and reason- 
able one ? and how far has he succeeded in carrying it 



GEEMANY. 263 

out? If these questions are answered with insight 
and friendliness, we have rendered a real service to 
the author." 1 Goethe was not the first to act upon 
this principle. But no previous critic had grasped it 
so clearly, and none had carried it out with such con- 
sistency. Through Carlyle — a somewhat reluctant 
channel — it has come, at least in theory, to be the 
accepted principle of criticism even in the land of the 
Edinburgh and Quarterly. 

But, with all his general services to literature and 
thought, it is as poet — above all, as lyric poet and 
as lyric poet dramatist — that Goethe dominates the life 

and dramatist. of hig time> jj ere he not Qn j y opene( J 

treasures entirely new in the history of his country; 
he is the most commanding figure in an age which, 
throughout Europe, was richly endowed with poetic 
genius. Few poets have known so instinctively how 
to touch the deepest springs of thought, feeling, and 
experience. With few has wealth of material so 
completely gone hand in hand with imaginative in- 
sight or with command of all the resources of poetic 
utterance. In the work of his later years it was 
almost inevitable that these high qualities should 
tend to fall apart; that imagination should be over- 
weighted at one time by technical skill, at others by 
the stress of reflection gathered during a lifetime. 
In the second part of Faust, perhaps in the West- 
ostlicher Divan, the body of thought still remains, and, 
with it, the " plastic stress " which can print grace of 
form upon matters the most intractable. But the 

1 Werlce, t. xxix., p. 186. 



264 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

soul seems to have departed; aiid it is seldom that 
a flash comes to recall the Goethe of the youthful 
lyrics, of Iphigenie, of the earlier Faust. These are 
the works by which he is to be judged, — these, 
and occasional outbreaks of his former self such 
as startle us in TJm Mitternacht (1821) and Gott 
und Welt (1804-1829) and passages of the second 
Faust. 

In one point it may be admitted that Goethe 
went far to open a false scent. The worship of the 
influence of Greeks, which inspired some of his hap- 
Heiienism. pj es t poetry, brought an influence into 
German literature which was misleading to others, 
and at times even to himself. The stiffness, which 
is the fatal defect of Schiller's later dramas, may 
probably be traced to this source ; and it is the 
direct cause of the aberration which induced Goethe 
to pour his essentially Gothic legend into the 
Greek mould of Selena. The result, as he himself 
jestingly complained, was a hybrid monster, the 
" tragelaphos " of his letters to Schiller. And it 
is difficult to understand how so great a poet can 
have plunged, with his eyes open, into such a blunder. 
In Iphigenie, which represents the fine flower of this 
Hellenic enthusiasm, the poet is complete master of 
his material. He takes the Greek form, the Greek 
legend, and moulds them imperiously to his own 
purpose. In Helena, form and matter are in glaring 
conflict ; and, with all his technical skill, the author 
conspicuously fails to conceal the discord. And, if 
this was so with the master, how was it likely to 



GERMANY. 265 

be with the disciples ? It is hard not to bear a 
grudge against Goethe for giving a false direction 
to powers so original as those of Schiller and, in 
our own literature, of Arnold. 

What, then, is the relation of Goethe to the 
romantic movement? How does he stand towards 
ms relation its narrower and its wider aspect? In 
to Romance. ^ s ma tter, more even than most writers 
of his time, he was torn in two directions. His 
earlier works — Gotz, and Werther, for instance, and 
the first draft of Faust — are purely romantic in 
spirit, and largely so in execution. Yet, with some 
reserves in the case of Faust, it is rather the wider 
than the more special qualities of romance that 
they reflect ; its popular sympathies rather than its 
antiquarian leanings, its sentiment rather than its 
craving for the supernatural. Even with Faust, as 
we have seen, the exception is more apparent than 
real. And, like most of the supreme figures of his 
time, — with the next generation it was different, — 
Goethe held himself aloof from the more technical 
issues of the romantic movement. 

As the world pressed more and more heavily 
upon his spirit, he turned for relief to the repose 
Andt0 of Greek poetry and art. This tendency 
classicism. b e g an to show itself some few years 
after his settlement at Weimar. It was confirmed 
by the Italian journey and the direct contact with 
classical sculpture and the masterpieces of the 
Eenaissance, into which he was then brought. It 
is from that time that we must date the conflict 



266 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

between the classical and the romantic spirit, which 
makes itself felt throughout the rest of his life. 
Sometimes, as in Iphigenie and Hermann, the two 
are harmonised with the happiest effect. At other 
times, as in the greater part of the second Faust, 
they meet but refuse to blend. Yet again, there 
are poems where one element triumphs to the ex- 
clusion of the other: the classical element, in the 
Eoman Elegies ; the romantic, in the finest scenes 
of the second Faust, or a stray lyric such as Um 
Mitternacht. On the whole, it must be said that, 
after 1786, the classical influence is the stronger of 
the two. And that is what Goethe himself, as critic, 
would have desired. 1 Who shall say whether he was 
right ? 

The fame of Schiller (1759-1805), hardly less 

bright in his own country than that of Goethe, 

shines with diminished lustre across the 

Schiller. . - 

frontier. And no foreigner who accepts 
the more modest estimate can speak otherwise than 
with misgiving. 

His literary life is commonly divided into three 
periods: I. 1781-1785; II. 1785-1794; III. 1794- 
1805. 

I. 1781-85. It was in the Drama that Schiller 
first won renown ; and it is on the Drama that, 

1 " Classisch ist das Gesunde, Roman tisch das Kranke." Spriiche 
in Prosa, t. xiii., p. 223. It must be remembered, however, that 
the "romantic," which he had in his eye, was that of Tieck and the 
Schlegela. 



GERMANY. 267 

in his own country, his fame still principally 
rests. His first play, Die Rauher (begun 

Die Rauber. J \ o 

1777, published 1781), caused a greater 
ferment than any work which had appeared since 
Werther. And it is easy to find the secret of 
its unbounded success. In substance, it may be 
described as an infinitely cruder Gotz. There is the 
same impatience of the artificial restraints of settled 
society ; the same belief in the patriarchal virtues 
of a glorified past. But the voice of Rousseau is 
far more defiantly heard. The indictment of " this 
ink-slobbering century " is infinitely more bitter. It 
is not to an historical past that Schiller looks for his 
golden age, but to the idealisations of Plutarch, the 
glittering vacuum of Eousseau, and the heroics of a 
virtuous brigand. There is a note of violence about 
the whole sentiment of the piece, and the characters 
and incidents are violent to match. The two leading 
figures, Karl Moor and his brother, are the stage 
hero and the stage villain incarnate. And the ex- 
travagance of the incidents reaches a climax in the 
scene, afterwards suppressed, where Karl, under 
threat of atrocious penalties, tears his mistress from 
the nunnery into which she had been thrust by 
his rival; or, if that be not a fair instance, in the 
despairing moans which rise from the dungeon where 
the old man had been buried alive by his son. Yet, 
in spite of such crudities, the play is one of un- 
mistakable genius. The character of Karl, with all 
its emphasis, has a touch of true heroism. The 
action, exaggerated as it is, is full of movement and 



268 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

effect. And, on the whole, Die Hauler remains the 
most imaginative monument of the mingled bitterness 
and idealism, the aspirations and the resentments, 
which a few years later swept the whole fabric 
of feudal society in France and the neighbouring 
countries to the ground. This is the true source of 
its inspiration; this is the key to the boundless 
applause with which it was received. 

Of the two plays which immediately followed — 
Fiesko (1783) and Kabale und Liebe (1784) — it is 
impossible to speak. But, side by side 
with the dramatic work of this period, 
there is a body of lyrical poetry, some five-and- 
twenty pieces in all, which must be taken into 
account. Many of them may be lightly dismissed. 
They reproduce but too faithfully the most highly- 
charged features of the contemporary plays. The 
skull and cross-bones alternate with the lover's 
sighs and the lover's tears — his " Ach ! " of despair 
or ecstasy — in the ever-recurring imagery of these 
pieces. There are two or three, however, which 
rise far above this depressing level and give 
promise, even more than is to be found in Die 
JRduber, of Schiller's future achievement. These 
are Der Triumph der Liebe, Die Freundschaft, 
and the two stanzas to the memory of Eousseau. 
The first is the least striking of the three; and 
the same theme — "'Tis love which makes the world 
go round" — is handled at once with deeper feel- 
ing and a firmer touch in the second. Seldom, if 
ever, has this thought, so dear to the men of 



GERMANY. 269 

Schiller's generation, been more powerfully con- 
ceived and worked out than in this poem. And 
the closing stanza, in which the very creation of 
man is ascribed to an inextinguishable need of love 
in the breast of God, is Schiller at his best. In 
the lines on Eousseau, the thought is necessarily 
cast in a narrower mould. But the feeling is no 
less deep, and the imaginative form is yet more 
perfect. Its glowing humanity is an enduring wit- 
ness to the influences which dominated his earlier 
life, and which, in one form or another, were with 
him to the close. 

II. The second period (1785-94) is comparatively 
poor in poetic activity. It is rather a time in 
which, " by labour and intense study," 
Schiller was preparing himself for the 
harvest of the future. One play only, Don Carlos, 
belongs to these years ; and the lyrics hardly amount 
to more than a dozen pieces. On the other hand, 
there is a large body of prose writings — historical, 
critical, and general — which testify to the poet's 
incessant labours in self-culture and the acquire- 
ment of knowledge. In both directions, the toils of 
these ten years were to leave a deep mark upon his 
subsequent creative work. 

Don Carlos (begun 1784, published 1787) is the 

earliest of Schiller's great dramas, and much is to 

be said for the opinion that it is the 

Don Carlos. . 

best. No competent judge would dream 
of claiming for it either the majesty or the artistic 
finish of Wallenstein. But the characters have more 



270 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

life and movement than in any of the later plays ; 
if we except Die Brant von Messina, the whole 
drama is more aflame with passion. And where 
these, the breath and soul of the drama, are 
present, we may put up with many shortcomings 
in less vital matters. In style, no less than in 
matter and dramatic treatment, Carlos shows a 
surprising advance on Die Rditber, not to mention 
the intermediate pieces. Casting aside the prose, 
which, according to the significant fashion of the 
time, he had accepted as the only natural form of 
dramatic speech, Schiller writes in blank verse as 
flexible as it is musical. But the supreme quality 
of the play is its mastery of dramatic motive, the 
genius with which the poet makes his characters 
not merely reveal themselves but, in the strictest 
sense, grow before our eyes under the stress of cir- 
cumstance and action. This is the specific mark 
of the romantic drama; and except in the plays 
of Browning, which by their very excess of this 
quality are manifestly unfitted for representation, it 
is nowhere seen more clearly than in Carlos. The 
King, Posa, Carlos himself, are all shining examples 
of this method. Contrast them with the correspond- 
ing figures in Alfieri's Filippo, which was taken a 
few years earlier (1775-81) from the same source, 
the romance of Saint Eeal ; and though there is 
nothing in Schiller's play to equal the sombre effect 
of Filippo's settled cruelty and profound dissimula- 
tion, it will at once be evident how vast was the 
advantage which he drew from replacing the fixed 



GERMANY. 271 

types of the classical by the life and warmth and 
growth of the romantic drama. 

Schiller has often been charged with using the 

characters of this play, and in particular that of 

Posa, as the mouthpiece of his own 

Advance in L 

dramatic humanitarian convictions. The accusa- 
tion, however true, is not very damaging. 
The question is not whether the dramatist is, or 
is not, in agreement with the ideas or sentiments 
which he has put upon the lips of one personage 
or another, but whether his characters are truly 
conceived and consistently drawn, whether they are 
men of flesh and blood or no. That Posa has 
reality, though doubtless an idealised reality, it 
would be difficult to deny. And it may be suspected 
that the real ground of objection to him is that his 
sentiments are misliked ; or, if that be thought unfair, 
that his critics resent the adoption of a theme, which 
makes appeal to such sentiments, as the central motive 
of a drama. Even in the milder form the criticism 
seems wanting in tolerance. For, unless the ideal 
motive interferes with the individuality of the char- 
acter, there is no just ground of quarrel against the 
dramatist for employing it. The real weakness of 
Carlos — and it is a weakness from which Schiller's 
plays are rarely free — is the dazzling succession of 
startling, not to say sensational, incidents with which 
it closes. And the defence of them which is to be 
found in the Briefe uber Don Carlos (1788) — a defence 
which on other points has much weight — can hardly 
be said to carry conviction. At the same time, it 



272 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

must be allowed that each of these incidents, taken 
singly, is charged with a legitimate effect. The 
appearance of the Grand Inquisitor, for instance, to 
clench the wavering purpose of the King, is deeply 
and tragically impressive. It is the accumulation of 
such incidents that gives the reader pause. 

Yet, in spite of this and other defects, the drama 
is full of genius. And it gives promise — a promise 
which, in fact, was hardly fulfilled — of still greater 
achievements in the future. The plot is so handled 
as to throw the play of conflicting interests and 
passions into the boldest relief. The characters 
stand out with startling vividness. And, through 
the whole action, we are brought face to face with 
great issues gathered in mortal struggle for the 
possession of men's souls. 

From Carlos we turn to the poems and prose 
writings of the same period. The former, as has 

Lyrics of been said, are few in number; and the 

this period, longest of them are translations from 
Virgil, significant mainly as marking the dawn of 
the classical influence which was destined so power- 
fully to mould both the form and the spirit of his 
later work. Apart from these we have, in the first 
place, two poems — Der Kampf and Resignation — 
which, by subject at any rate, belong rather to the 
earlier period. Both deal with the conflict between 
love and duty, which his passion for Frau von Kalb 
brought very close to his heart and conscience at this 
time. As compared, however, with Die Freigeisterei 
der Leidenschaft, an earlier poem subsequently sup- 



GERMANY. 273 

pressed, 1 they show a striking advance in dignity 
of thought. The sentiment is less exaggerated, and 
the execution much more mature. Of the remain- 
ing poems, two stand out as splendid examples of 
Schiller's genius in a very different vein of lyric 
inspiration. They are Die Gotter Griechenlands and 
Die Kilnstler. 

Both these poems abound in vivid imagery. Both 

show the reflective strain of which Schiller was so 

great a master. Of the two, Die Kilnstler 

Die Kunstler. P . . . 

(1/88-89) is the more important, its im- 
agery still more abundant, its reflective genius still 
deeper. The subject, too, the mission of art to 
humanise man by visualising truth, gives fuller scope 
for the passionate enthusiasm which was always the 
surest source of Schiller's inspiration. It is true 
that, with all the pains bestowed in remodelling it, 
perhaps in consequence of them, the poem still 
remains obscure in several places ; that the connec- 
tion of thought is not always clear ; in a word, that 
the reflective element is not completely disengaged 
from the philosophic mould in which it was origin- 
ally cast, that it is not fused through and through 
by the fire of imagination. Schiller himself felt 
this so strongly that he excluded it — though, as he 
confessed, with a pang — from the collected issue of 
his poems. But posterity has been more lenient, 
and it has been right. When all deductions have 
been made, Die Kilnstler remains a singularly noble 
poem. It embodies, perhaps more completely than 

1 Or rather, edited out of all recognition into Der Kampf, 
S 



274 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

any other, the purer and more intellectual side 
of the revolutionary ideal — the ideal which, within 
a few weeks of its publication, was to be wel- 
comed by the universal voice of France ; which, in 
that purer shape, was the most fruitful influence 
on the thought and imaginative movement of the 
time ; and which was welcomed with whole-hearted 
devotion by men so different as Wordsworth and 
Schiller. 1 

Of the prose writings of this period little is to 

be said, at any rate in this place. Of the more 

miscellaneous ones, the most important 

Prose works. . ■ . /+*r>n\ 

are the riiiLosopliiscrie Briefe (17oo) and 
Der Geisterseher (1787-89). The former is chiefly 
memorable for its statement of Schiller's intellectual 
position, as it was before he turned to the study 
of Kant; and it should be mentioned that the final 
letter (Eaphael to Julius), which points the way to 
that study, is from the hand of Korner, to whom 
the opening letters were originally addressed. The 
latter is a lively but extremely crude romance, 
merely significant as showing, on the one hand, the 
tendency, so strong in Schiller's early dramas and 
never entirely shaken off, towards plots of exagger- 
ated intrigue ; and, on the other hand, the deep 
suspicion against priestcraft and the Church with 
which, as Carlos testifies, the imagination of Schiller 
was at this time haunted. 

1 See his Briefwechsel mit Korner, i. 397 ; ii. 75. This, together 
with the later Briefwechsel mit Goethe, forms the chief authority for 
Schiller's inner life 



GERMANY. 275 

The other writings are either historical or philo- 
sophical. The histories, careful as far as they go, are 
rather of general than of scientific interest. Schiller 
makes no attempt to draw upon other than already 
printed matter, and his style is apt to be rhetorical. 
With these rather serious abatements, his historical 
work is commonly spoken of with respect, and it 
undoubtedly did much to arouse an intelligent interest 
in historical subjects. But for us its main importance 
lies in its connection with his personal and literary 
life. The Revolt of the Netherlands (1788) may be 
described as an offshoot of Don Carlos; the History 
of the Thirty Tears War (1789-93) as a prelude to 
Wallenstein. The former secured him a home, with 
some faint approach to a subsistence, at the University 
of Jena; the latter was his occupation and support 
under the first attack (1791) of the disease which 
eventually proved fatal. The discipline that he wrung 
from these labours was of the greatest service to his 
intellectual growth. But intrinsically they are of far 
less worth than the philosophical inquiries with which 
he busied himself during these and the few following 
years (1789-95). All these, however, including his 
inaugural lecture on the study of universal history, 
are avowedly based on the speculations of Kant, and 
they can most suitably be treated in connection with 
that branch of our inquiry. 

III. 1794-1805. We pass at once to the third 
period of Schiller's activity — the period of 

Thivd period. 

his friendship with Goethe. When Schiller 
returned to poetry after his long silence, it was not 



276 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

as dramatist but as lyric poet that he came forward. 
And it is on the work of the next five years (to 1799) 
that his fame as lyric poet principally rests. These 
poems may be roughly divided into two groups : the 
former of which, belonging mainly to 1795, gives ex- 
pression to Schiller's deepest thoughts on man's life 
and the mission of imaginative art ; while the latter, 
written for the most part in 1797, consists of pieces 
approaching more or less nearly to the ballad form. 

Of those which deal with the destiny of man, the 
most memorable are Die Ideale, Licht und Warme, 
Hoffnung, and, though they lack the strictly 
lyrical form, Der Spaziergang and Das 
verschleierte Bild zu Sais} And these are the poems 
which, perhaps more than any others, have won for 
Schiller the affection of his readers. With wonderful 
grace and force they paint the hopes and the trust- 
fulness of youth, the disillusionment which is apt to 
come with years, the sobered hope which returns with 
deeper experience and brings such " calm of mind, all 
passions spent," as Milton found in the theme of his 
great tragedy. 

No less notable, in some respects even more so, 
Das Reich der are the poems which embody the ideal 
schatten. of arfc that g c hiller had worked out for 
himself during the few years immediately preced- 

1 One other must be mentioned, though it hardly comes under this 
head — Die Theilung der Erde. It is one of the most charming and 
pathetic fancies that ever came to a poet. Goethe pronounced it 
" allerliebst," and was flattered to hear that by some readers — not 
very discerning, it must be confessed — it was attributed to him. See 
Goethe's letter of Oct. 28, 1795, and Schiller's of Dec. 23, 1795. 



GERMANY. 277 

ing. The most important of these is Das Ideal und 
das Lebeii or, as it was significantly called in the 
first instance, Das Reich der Schatten, " the realm 
of shadows " (1795). Schiller himself seems to have 
considered this the ripest fruit of his lyrical genius. 
And, if we are allowed to place with it one or two 
of the later ballads, there is no reason to dispute 
the judgment. A comparison between it and Die 
Kilnstler, which stands so close to it in subject, 
at once shows how great was the advance in the 
technical mastery of his craft which he had made in 
the interval. There is the same imaginative grasp of 
ideas, the same command of symbolism and imagery. 
But the two strands are now more closely interwoven. 
The central idea has been more clearly thought out, 
and is therefore fused more completely through and 
through by the poet's imagination. This is the greater 
triumph, because in itself the thought of the later 
poem is more elusive, more " shadowy," than that of 
the earlier one. Yet, in spite of all obstacles, the 
poet's strength never fails him, and the thought sweeps 
on in a procession of spontaneous imagery from begin- 
ning to end. 

But the contrast between the two poems goes 

much deeper than this. And it is one which marks 

an entire revolution in Schiller's concep- 

Revolutwn Ml # * 

schuier s conccp- tion of his art. In Die Kilnstler the 
nopwnj. f unc ^ on f ar fc j s t0 interpret life, to 

lead man through and by the world of sense to the 
world of ideal truth which lies behind it. Here, 
on the contrary, it is to reveal an ideal world, a 



278 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

" world of shadows," which lies altogether apart from 
the strife of action and passion ; a world which man 
can only hope to reach, in so far as he cuts himself 
adrift from their importunate realities. In all this 
there is, doubtless, an element of truth. It is an 
element which came to Schiller in part from his 
philosophical speculations ; in part through his de- 
votion to what he conceived to be the spirit of Greek 
art, — to what, rightly or wrongly, he took to be the 
teaching of Goethe. And, if he had confined himself 
to saying that art can never be the same thing as 
reality, that in great art there is always a touch of 
calm which lifts it above reality, he would have said 
no more than is true. In fact, however, he goes far 
beyond this. He divorces the one region absolutely 
from the other; he forbids poetry to concern itself 
with flesh and blood; he banishes it to a world of 
shadows. 

No genius and no strength of will could carry out 

such a theory with rigorous consistency. And, with 

to u his passionate nature and his love of effect, 

carried out Schiller was perhaps less likely than most 

men to succeed in the attempt. But as an 

ideal the theory remained with him to the end, and 

its influence can be clearly traced upon much of his 

subsequent work, — upon Die Braut von Messina and 

one or two of the Greek lyrics in particular. In 

Die Klage der Ceres, for instance, which is perhaps 

the most perfect of those lyrics, 1 he may fairly claim 

1 The one most closely approaching to it in spirit is Das Eleusische 
Fest. 



GERMANY. 279 

to have gone far to satisfy his own rigid requirements. 
Here the bounds of life and death seem almost to 
melt away at the mother's lament, and the corn, as 
it strikes root downward and bears fruit upward, 
weaves with the return of each year a fresh bond 
between the living and the dead. Yet even here the 
triumph of the theory is more apparent than real, and 
the abiding charm of the poem, which it is not easy 
to exaggerate, lies in its appeal to the deepest and 
most universal instincts of humanity. 1 

In other poems of the period the doctrine of 

shadows is forgotten. And this is hardly less true of 

the Greek lyrics than of the ballads cast in 

Die Kraniche. . 

a mediaeval setting. Thus Die Kraniche aes 
Ibykus has to some critics seemed too obvious in its 
motive and too melodramatic in its treatment. The 
criticism is hardly just. But at least it serves to show 
how impossible it was for Schiller to move persistently 
in the rarefied ether of his own theory, and how ready 
he was, when occasion offered, to exchange it for the 
grosser atmosphere which other poets are commonly 
content to breathe. By a curious irony, the greatest 
of Greek poets and the high-priest of modern Hellen- 
ism may be called consenting parties to his apostasy. 

1 The nearest approach to the classicism of Schiller is perhaps to 
be found in the poems of Holderlin (1770-1843), otherwise known as 
the author of Hyperion (1797), a romance of which the scene is cast 
in modern Greece, and as the friend of Hegel. His earlier pieces 
(Das Schicksal, Griechenland, &c. ) were published in Thalia and other 
Miscellanies edited by Schiller (1794-96), and are clearly inspired by 
Die Obtter Griechenlands and other poems by Schiller. The last forty 
years of his life were spent in confinement. 



280 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

For the chant of the Eumenides, which forms the 
crisis of the story, was taken almost word for word 
from Humboldt's translation of iEschylus ; and more 
than one of the most vivid phrases and incidents of 
the poem were suggested by Goethe. 

Naturally, however, it is in the mediaeval ballads 

that the happy inconsequence of Schiller in this 

matter is seen most plainly. The crown 

Dsr TaucliGr. 

of these, there can be little doubt, is 
Der Taitcher (1797). 1 And here Schiller throws all 
theories, all Greek memories, to the winds ; he sur- 
renders himself heart and soul to the romantic 
impulse which lay at the core of his poetic nature. 
The horror of the whirlpool seething beneath the cliff, 
the brave plunge of the boy after the goblet which the 
king hurls into it, the hushed thrill of the onlookers 
as they watch for the back-rush of the waters, the first 
glimpse of the white arm holding the cup aloft, the 
boy's recital of the ghastly wonders he had seen below, 
the second throwing of the cup and the second plunge 
of the undaunted youth, this time with no return, 
— these are the incidents of one of the most glowing 
romances, and assuredly the least shadowy, that was 
ever written ; and Schiller handles them with the ex- 
ulting and abounding mastery of the born romantic. 
The one blot on the poem is the incredible levity of 
the king in inciting the boy to the second plunge. It 
is as though Schiller had forgotten that even romance 
has its laws of probability and fitness, and that they 

1 The chief others are Der Gang nach dem Eisenhammer and Der 
Kam])/ mit dem Drachen. 



GERMANY. 281 

cannot be overridden with impunity. Once more, he 
was here carried away by his love of effect. But if 
that be a defect on any showing, is it not doubly so on 
the theory of shadows ? 

A comparison between the ballads of Schiller and 
Goethe is hardly to be avoided. The methods of the 
Ballads of two men are very different. So are the 
Go^e' and subjects they best love to choose. Schiller 
compared. no doubt commonly comes nearer to the 
traditional form and manner of the ballad. Cer- 
tainly incident plays a much larger part with him 
than it does with Goethe. Die Kraniche, Der Gang 
nach dem Eisenhammer, and Der Taucher are all 
ballads of incident, and they by no means exhaust 
the list. It would be hard to mention a single ballad 
by Goethe of which the same thing could be said with 
the same truth. Goethe seldom, if ever, contents him- 
self with pure incident. He eschews the description 
and the direct moral appeal, in which Schiller excels. 
But he has the secret of atmosphere, the power of 
wakening the emotion appropriate to his subject by 
indefinable suggestion, to a degree which has seldom 
been rivalled, and of which the more boisterous touch 
of Schiller is entirely innocent. This is most clearly 
seen by the manner in which each approaches the 
theme of terror. Of the darker forms of terror 
Schiller is a master — the horror of nature in Der 
Taucher; the horror of a sudden remorse in Die 
Kraniche. With Goethe, on the other hand, even 
the less poignant forms of terror fade into the back- 
ground. Terror may enter into Die Brant von Korinth 



282 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

— the terror of the supernatural. But it enters merely 
as an element, and it is overshadowed by the other 
emotions — love, rapture, despair, indignation — which 
he drew from the essentially tragic subject. More 
commonly, however, it is not the terror of the super- 
natural, but the vague apprehension, the subtle fascina- 
tion of it, that he renders. This is so in particular 
with Erlhonig and Der Fischer. The latter natur- 
ally suggests a comparison with Der Taucher. The 
subject of both is in some sense the same — the relent- 
less might of the waters. But what Schiller sees is 
their peril and their horror. Goethe thinks only of 
the spell by which they draw man, as of his own will, 
to destruction. 

On the whole, it may be said that Goethe's ballads 
are at once simpler and more ideal — that they strike a 
deeper note and are far richer in suggestion than those 
of Schiller. Compare, for instance, Der Taucher with 
Der Konig in Thtde. The incident which forms the 
germ of each poem is the same — the throwing of the 
goblet. To Schiller this calls up a glowing vision of 
unknown terrors and romantic daring. To Goethe it 
stands for the set resolve of the love which triumphs 
over death. Each poem is a masterpiece in its kind. 
But can it be doubted that Goethe's is the rarer and 
the higher ? 

The one poem which it remains to mention is the 

well-known Lied von der Glocke (1799), a poem hardly 

less popular in its own country than Gray's 

Die Glocke. r . r . J J 

Elegy is in ours, and for much the same 
reasons. Thanks to the genius with which Schiller 



GERMANY. 283 

chooses his symbol, the casting of the bell, the theme, 
which might readily have seemed tedious and vapid, 
becomes full of stir and vividness; and the familiar 
tale of the joys and sorrows, the cloud and sunshine, 
which await man from the cradle to the grave, is 
mingled at every turn with the eager toil of the work- 
shop and the clang of the hammer and the guiding 
call of the master-workman's voice. This was the last 
lyric of importance written by Schiller, and it was 
performed, as was fitting, at the solemn commemora- 
tion held under Goethe's direction shortly after his 
death. 

The last seven or eight years of Schiller's life were 

given almost entirely to the Drama. Wallenstein, 

which had been on the stocks since 1796, 

Later dramas. . 

was first performed in 1799. Maria Stuart 
followed in 1800, Die Jungfrau von Orleans in 1801, 
Die Braut von Messina in 1803, Wilhelm Tell in 1804, 
about a year before his death. Of these, Wallenstein 
and Die Brant von Messina are the most typical of his 
genius. 

Twelve years separated Wallenstein x from Don 
Carlos, and in the interval Schiller had entirely 

changed his dramatic methods. Wallen- 

Wallenstein. , . 

stein has neither the same kind or detects 
nor the same kind of merit that is to be found 
in the earlier play. The restlessness of Carlos, the 
excessive accumulation of incident, the tendency to 
over -idealisation of character — all these are gone. 

1 Wallenstein^ $ Lager, Wallenstein and Die Piccolomini are here 
treated as one play. 



284 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

But so also are the warmth and glow, the close 
grip of character, the power of presenting character 
as shaping itself to fresh issues with each turn 
of the action. In a word, we have passed at one 
stroke from the romantic to the classical model. 
Appearances in this instance may easily deceive. 
The historical subject of the play, its great if not 
inordinate length — which, even without the Prologue 
( Wallensteins Lager), is considerably more than that 
of Carlos, itself one of the longest plays on record, — the 
large space allotted in the closing acts to the loves of 
Max and Thekla: these, no doubt, are rather in the 
vein of romance than of the classical tradition. But 
when allowance has been made for all these things, it 
remains true that the dominant impression left by the 
play is the reverse of romantic. The characters, vigor- 
ously as they are drawn, lack the fulness and the 
warmth of romantic tragedy ; the language and rhythm, 
if more stately, are also stiffer and less flexible than 
those of Carlos. Everything, as Schiller himself says, 
is subordinated to the simplification and unity of the 
plot. The other " unities," though not observed to the 
letter, are violated but slightly and with obvious com- 
punction. And the slaughter of the tenth act, though 
plentiful enough to appal the stoutest heart, is con- 
ducted entirely behind the scenes. 

That all this is due to Schiller's new-born ardour 
for the spirit and methods of Greek poetry would be 
sufficiently clear, even if the evidence of his own letters 
and contemporary lyrics were wanting. Whether the 
classical model was altogether suited to the subject he 



GERMANY. 285 

had chosen, or again, which is yet more important, 
whether it was enough in harmony with his own 
natural instincts, is another matter. There is much 
ground for the conclusion that, in departing from his 
earlier manner, Schiller did violence both to his sub- 
ject and himself; and the immense effort that it cost 
him has left its mark but too plainly on the constraint 
and the very magnificence of his style. The influence 
of Goethe and, still more, the example of Iphigenie, 
were in fact misleading. And the fusion of classical 
and romantic which the elder poet had accomplished 
by a divine chance in that masterpiece was beyond 
the reach of any genius less potent and less steeped 
in the instincts of poetry than his. 

But when all this has been said, Wallenstein remains 
a most impressive drama. And if we consider how 
intractable the material was, we can only marvel at 
the genius which drew from it so striking a result. 
Of all dramas that claim to be historical, it is perhaps 
the only one of modern times which completely justi- 
fies the title. Apart from the episode of the lovers — 
which, at least in the closing scenes, is too manifestly 
an episode — Schiller confines himself rigorously to the 
historical matter, and by the sheer force of genius 
he succeeds in fusing it through and through with 
dramatic fire. After the Prologue — in itself a dramatic 
masterpiece which paints the army of fortune collected 
round the standard of Wallenstein — the action sweeps 
on without a pause from the first scene to the last. We 
are made not merely to see but to feel the storm first 
gathering, then breaking with irresistible force upon the 



286 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

head of the aspiring traitor. The sense of impending 
doom deepens from act to act, and the tragic horror of 
the close is indescribable. Yet even here the weakness, 
as well as the strength, of Schiller makes itself felt. 
Throughout he is rather the master of great scenic 
effects than the dramatist who controls the deepest 
springs of human character and sympathy. Max ex- 
cepted, no one of the personages has a touch of the 
heroism without which tragedy in the highest sense is 
impossible. The rest, from Wallenstein downwards, 
are a viper's nest of treachery. And once released 
from the spell which Schiller has cast over his imagina- 
tion, the spectator is apt to be haunted by a sense of 
hollowness. 

In Die Braid von Messina Schiller breaks entirely 
fresh ground ; though here, too, the inevitable contrast 
DieBraut between the romantic groundwork of his 
von Messina. g en i us an( j the classical superstructure is 
apparent. In outward form it is the most purely 
classical of all his dramas. It is so in the small 
number of the personages — four alone sustain the 
whole action of the play. It is so in the simplicity 
of the plot, in the revival of the chorus, in the de- 
claration of war on " naturalism " and all its works, 
which Schiller issues in an elaborate preface. On 
the other hand, the theme of the play, the passionate 
love of two brothers for the same woman, is clearly 
romantic rather than classical ; it is surrounded with 
many accessories of romantic circumstance ; and it is 
set forth with all the fire and glow of the romantic 
temper. In all these points, as well as in the constant 



GERMANY. 287 

employment of the rhymed stanza, it is difficult not 
to believe that Schiller, unconsciously perhaps, was 
influenced rather by Calderon — who first became 
known to the Weimar circle in the year when he was 
at work upon Die Braid (1802) 1 — than by the Greeks. 
Certainly the whole atmosphere of the piece recalls 
that of the Castilian dramatist. And this is a timely 
reminder that, in their most perfect examples, the 
classical and the romantic drama, with all their differ- 
ences, have yet many points of contact. It is with 
the pseudo-classical spirit that the romantic instinct, 
in each of its many forms, is irreconcilably at war. 

In this play, assuredly, the two strains mingle 
without the slightest appearance of constraint. Never 
had Schiller conceived his action so simply ; never 
had he lit it up with such a flame of passion, or found 
such lyric fervour of language to ennoble it. The one 
blot on the drama is the chorus in which, with a poet's 
perversity, he took such immeasurable pride. It was 
designed to idealise the action. Its effect on the mind 
of most readers will be the very reverse. To find an 
equivalent — if a remote equivalent — for the chorus 
of Greek tragedy is not impossible, as Goethe had 
shown in Iphigenie, as Manzoni was to show in 
Carmagnola and Adelchi. To transplant it directly 

1 See Goethe's Annalen, year 1802. Wilhelm Schlegel's translation 
of selected plays by Calderon did not appear till the following year. 
But it was known to Goethe and Schiller by 1802 (Gesprache, i. 
241-3 : Oct. 1802) ; and Friedrich Schlegel's Alarcos, a play stamped 
with Calderon's influence from beginning to end, was performed 
under their direction in that year ; while Tieck's Genoveva, the first 
symptom of the cult of Calderon, had appeared in 1800. 



288 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

into the modern drama, even in the modified form 
adopted by Schiller, is a hopeless task. For the 
reader, however, if not for the spectator, this is a 
defect which it is happily easy to overlook. And, 
on the whole, Die Braut von Messina must be reckoned 
as the most faultless — and, side by side with Don 
Carlos, as the most powerful and original — of Schiller's 
plays. 

Nothing could well be greater than the contrast 
between these two masterpieces. Carlos is manifestly 
contrasted immature ; but it gives promise, and some- 
with Carlos, thing more than promise, of the two quali- 
ties most essential to dramatic genius, — a profound 
knowledge of the springs of action, and an inborn 
faculty for transmuting the great issues of human 
action and passion into poetry. In Die Brant wn 
Messina the latter element has won undisputed 
mastery ; the former is held under rigorous control. 
The drama, to Schiller, is no longer the mirror 
of life, but a cloud - picture recalling it in more 
shadowy outline, — in richer, but more evanescent, 
colours. The figures on his ideal stage are still of 
like passions with ourselves, but they move behind a 
half-transparent veil, and the voices that reach us are 
as the voices of a dream. The close grip of the poet 
on the realities of life is lost, or rather deliberately 
surrendered. The admonitions of Das Ideal und das 
Leben are here worked out upon the stage. We are 
transported by the magic wand of the poet to the 
" realm of shadows." That Schiller attained the end 
he sought is beyond dispute. But is it certain that 



GERMANY. 289 

it was as well worth striving for as that which he 
forsook ? 

A word must be added about Wilhelm Tell, not so 
much on account of its intrinsic beauty as for the 
light it throws on the sympathies, and still more on 
the influence, of the author. It may be true, as has 
been said, 1 that Schiller was not primarily drawn to 
the subject by his old passion for freedom. The 
patriarchal cast which he gives to the action and 
characters, the substitution of local for cosmopolitan 
ideals, make it unlikely that he was so. Yet it is 
hard to believe that the patriotic impulse was alto- 
gether absent from his mind ; and the same applies 
to the Jungfrau von Orleans, In any case, there can 
be no doubt that the choice of such a theme for two 
of his latest dramas greatly endeared him to the men 
of the Liberation War and the subsequent struggle 
for political liberty. It is this, and the direct appeal 
of his simpler lyrics, that won the hearts of his 
countrymen. Before the subtleties of Die Braut von 
Messina and Das Reich der Schatten they would have 
remained cold. 

In taking leave of Schiller, it is hard to resist the 
impression that he himself was greater than anything 
he achieved. His genius was late in ripening; and, 
when it did ripen, was under influences which turned 
it from the natural direction of its growth. His ear 
for the music of poetry was never of the keenest ; and, 

1 By Hettner, in Die Rornantische Schule, in ihrem inneren Zusarn- 
menhang mit Goethe und Schiller — a most penetrating piece of 
criticism, 

T 



290 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

though in his greater plays he shows a high, some- 
times a consummate, mastery of the statelier cadences 
of blank verse, his lyric melody is seldom entirely 
satisfying. But on all his poetry there is stamped the 
impress of a great nature; "eternal youth," to para- 
phrase the noble tribute of Goethe/ " for ever striving 
towards the ideal himself and for ever struggling to 
embody it in his creations, a nature which nothing 
common or trivial could even approach — 

Und hinter ihm, in wesenlosen Scheme, 
Lag, was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine." 

With Schiller and Goethe the glory goes out of 
German literature. The giants are followed by the 
The Romantic pigmies. In spite of this, it was to an 
school. astonishing degree an age of literary fer- 

ment. The misfortune is that the vintage was not 
richer and the wine not of a stronger body. The 
centre of this ferment lies in the work of what may 
conveniently, though loosely, be called the romantic 
school. And the leading figures of that school — nor 
in this account is it possible to go beyond the leading 
figures — are the two Schlegels, Tieck, Werner, Eichter, 
and Novalis. 

The first three of these are so closely connected in 
their personal history, they have so many character- 
's character- istics in common, that it is natural to speak 
istics. f them together. The temper of the two 

former, no doubt, is more distinctly critical ; that of 

1 See Epilog zu Schiller's Glocke, spoken at the commemoration of 
August 10, 1805. WerJce, t. xv., p. 360. See Gesprdche, ii. 12. 



GERMANY. 291 

the last, productive and imaginative. But the aims 
with which all worked are fundamentally the same ; 
and in their influence they are not to be dissevered. 
Love of paradox and straining after effect, these are the 
first things to strike us in the vast body of work which 
they turned out of their factory. And when all allow- 
ance has been made for the great services which they 
rendered in the field of criticism, and still more of 
translation, this is the prevalent impression left at the 
close. Seldom has effect been sought so undisguisedly ; 
seldom has there been such indifference as to the 
choice of means. If the elder Schlegel brings out a 
classical drama adapted from the Ion of Euripides, the 
younger replies with a violently romantic tragedy 
drawn from a Spanish legend a few months later. 
And Tieck had paved the way for the latter in a 
drama still more choked with romantic machinery a 
few years before. In Wilhelm Schlegel's poems, 
ballads on Pygmalion and Arion alternate with 
" fantasies " on the burial of the Brahmin and 
sonnets or " romances " full of forced unction in 
honour of the Virgin. In Tieck, tales elaborated on 
the model of the Arabian Nights, with a strong dash 
of Vathek, are succeeded by full-blown novels, paint- 
ing the quest of culture after the fashion of Wilhelm 
Meister y or mingling the sentimental crudities of the 
Minerva Press with the intrigue and marvels of the 
Geisterseher. Is it strange that we should be left 
with a sense of mystification ? or be unable to quench 
the suspicion that the piquant setting, the timely 
shifting of the scenes, was the first object of these 



292 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

writers ; the poetic worth of the theme, the dramatic 
truth of the characters, an altogether secondary con- 
sideration? To put the matter in a more charitable 
light, the German romanticists started from the as- 
sumption that the true function of poetry, like that 
of music, is to give utterance to the vaguer feelings 
and yearnings of the imagination, to render moods 
rather than the realities and concrete passions of 
life. They forgot that, for this purpose, words are 
an instrument immeasurably inferior to musical 
sound. They forgot also that the symbolic method, 
on which they were inevitably driven, is a dangerous 
weapon ; that, in any sustained work of poetry, it 
is almost impossible to find symbols which shall 
suggest precisely the mood of the writer and nothing 
more; and that the artless inventions of mediaeval 
piety — in their first intention, nothing less than 
symbolic — were the very worst symbols in the world 
for the alembicated sentiments which they were 
arbitrarily taken to represent. 

Their most fruitful work, as has been said, lies 
in criticism and translation ; and it is with these 

„ -. that we begin. In criticism, it is with 

Criticism: ° 

FHedrich the Schlegels alone (Wilhelm, 1767-1845 ; 

scuegei. Friedrich> 1772-1829) that we have to 
deal; 1 and of the two, though the name of the 
elder is the more familiar in this country, it is clear 
that the younger was both the more learned and the 
more original. His critical work is of two kinds. 

1 The greater part of Tieck's critical work belongs to his later 
years (1819 onwards). 



GERMANY. 293 

In the first, he discharges the current duties of his 
office, reviewing the books of the day, estimating the 
literary tendencies of the hour, preaching the gospel 
of romanticism, and interspersing it with paradoxes — 
" Christianity is universal cynicism " 1 — carefully cal- 
culated to bewilder the public and to jostle its most 
cherished convictions. This is the weaker side of his 
achievement, and it met a well-merited chastisement in 
Der hyperloraische Esel of Kotzebue (1800). But even 
here we can trace a serious, if a somewhat perverted, 
purpose ; and we not seldom light on hints — such as 
his exaltation of the Pre-Eaphaelites or the saying 
that "the science of Poetry is its history" — which 
were destined to bear fruit at a later time. Much of 
his work in this kind is contained in the Athenaum 
(1798-1800) and in JSuropa (1803), the latter founded 
during his residence in Paris. Far more significant 
was the outcome of his serious studies. In his 
Geschichte der griechischen Poesie (begun 1794), followed 
by a continuation on the poetry of classical antiquity 
as a whole (1798) and by a Geschichte der alien und 
neuen Litteratur (1812), he may fairly claim to have 
led the way to the rational study of literary history 
as distinguished from literary antiquities, on the one 
hand, and the review of current literature upon the 
other. The attempt, no doubt, is imperfect, and it 
presents many gaps. But it comes nearer to the 

1 It is fair to say that the sentence is put hypothetical^ : " If the 
essence of Cynicism consists in putting nature before art, goodness 
before beauty and science, . . . then Christianity . . ." — Aihendwrn^ 



294 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

realisation of what has since become a widely accepted 
idea than any previous writing — for instance, Warton's 
History of English Poetry, or even the suggestive 
sketches of Herder — can be said to have done. And 
in this path he was subsequently followed by his 
brother. 

Tet more important are his studies in Indian 
poetry, Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808). This 
His Indian forms nothing short of an epoch in the 
studies. history of European learning, and even of 
letters and philosophy. Schlegel, again acting upon 
the hint of Herder, was the first to recognise the 
full value of the treasures recently (1784-94) laid 
open by Sir William Jones. His work may have 
been inspired by that distrust of "rationalism" 
which, in the very year of its publication, brought 
about his conversion to Catholicism. But, whatever 
the writer's motive, Europe stood to gain by the 
revelation of a thought and poetry so remote from 
her own. And from that day to this she has been 
haunted by the image of the "brooding East," with 
its immemorial wisdom and its inveterate mood of 
contemplation, so fascinating yet so incomprehensible 
to the " victorious West." In this, the literary side of 
his enterprise, Schlegel had to some extent been 
anticipated by Herder ; and he was followed, though 
at a long distance, by his brother some ten years 
later. 1 We may further note his influence upon the 

1 The Indische Biblioiheh was founded by W. Schlegel in 1819 ; the 
Hitopadesa — in which, however, the best part of the work is said to 
have been done by his collaborator, Lassen — was published 1829-31. 



GERMANY. 295 

later and, it must be admitted, less valuable develop- 
ments of the philosophy of Schelling, through whom, 
in all probability, the eastern strain has passed into 
the common stock of European thought. But there 
is another side of his labours which it would be un- 
just to overlook. He founded the study, not only of 
Hindoo literature, but of the Sanscrit language, upon 
the Continent, and but for him, the achievements of 
Wilhelm v. Humboldt, Grimm, and Bopp — and, with 
them, the triumphs of comparative philology — might 
have been long delayed. 1 

On Wilhelm Schlegel there is less need to linger. 
His chief importance, as critic, is to have been the 
wuheim recognised — though, by his own admission, 
schiegei. not vei y s i ncere — leader of the romantic 
school, and, in that capacity, to have directed a long, 
and often a bitter, war against the established celeb- 
rities of German poetry — Klopstock, Wieland, Lessing, 
Voss — and, above all, Schiller, whom he treated with 
such affectation of contempt that even Friedrich was 
constrained to protest. 2 Goethe was perhaps the one 
writer, not of his own following, whom he consistently 
exalted. And great was the fluttering of the dovecots 
when the Olympian, provoked beyond endurance by 
what he regarded as the narrowness of their politi- 
cal, religious, and literary creed, vehemently repudiated 

1 Humboldt's chief works in this field appeared 1820-30 ; Bopp's 
Lehrgebaiide dcr Sanskritsprache, 1827 ; Vergleichende GrammatiJc, 
1833-49. Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatih was published in 
1819 ; but his labours in Indo-European philology come later. 

2 See letter of Friedrich to Wilhelm Schlegel of Jan. 15, 1798 
(Briefe, i. 347). 



296 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the romantics and all their works (1817). 1 Apart 
from his place as official leader of the school, — and, it 
must be added, from some of his work on Shake- 
speare, — it is difficult to take the elder Schlegel quite 
seriously as critic. His judgments are commonly- 
superficial, and too often perverse. This may best be 
illustrated from the most popular of his writings, the 
Dramatische Vorlesungen (1808). Here was a subject 
which he had made peculiarly his own ; and by his 
treatment of it he may fairly be judged. Without 
pressing too hard, as perhaps Goethe did, on his 
depreciation of Euripides, though this came with a 
strangely ill grace from the author of Ion, no reader 
can fail to observe his coldness towards Eacine, still 
less his laboured endeavours to belittle Moliere. His 
handling of the Spanish Drama affords a yet more 
crucial instance of his barrenness. Calderon had been 
the stalking-horse of the brotherhood ; the translation 
of his selected plays by Schlegel himself, one of the 
chief moves in the romantic game. Yet nothing could 
be more empty than the account given of him in the 
lectures ; only in one paragraph does the critic venture 

1 Through the mouth of Heinrich Meyer in Kunst und Alterthum. 
The article, Die neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst, notoriously 
expressed the mind of Goethe. It was, as the title indicates, an 
attack on the mediaeval tendencies of current German Art. But 
these corruptions are traced to the influence of the romantics — 
Tieck, Wilhelin, and, above all, Friedrich Schlegel. The article is 
included in the Weimar edition of Goethe's Werke, t. xlix. (1), pp. 
23-59. A reflection of Goethe's wrath against the Schlegels, and, in 
a less degree, against Schelling, appears indirectly in the West-ostlichcr 
Divan, directly in the Sprilche in Reimen, " Nicht jeder kann alles 
ertragen," and the following pieces. 






GERMANY. 297 

within speaking distance of the poet. In spite of 
these defects, however, it would be unjust not to 
acknowledge that the design of the Lectures is strik- 
ingly original. It was the earliest attempt to view 
the Drama as a whole, to trace its gradual develop- 
ment from the rude beginnings of the earlier plays 
of iEschylus, or even of the Hindoos, to the subtlest 
creations of Calderon or Shakespeare. In this con- 
ception, at any rate, he was following worthily in the 
footsteps of his brother. 

In translation, a yet more potent instrument than 
criticism for the romantic campaign, the elder Schlegel 
Translations: asserts his supremacy ; and here he is 
shakes^are. c i ose iy associated with Tieck. Their most 
important translations are those of Shakespeare, 
Calderon, and Don Quixote : the first by both writers 
in friendly rivalry (1797 - 1833) ; the second by 
Schlegel (1803-9); the third by Tieck (1799). On 
the supreme merit of these translations — in particular 
of Schlegel's Shakespeare * — all competent judges are 
agreed. But what it here concerns us to note is that 
each presents a different aspect of the romantic 
movement. In the case of Shakespeare, this is best 
seen by a comparison with the earlier translations 
(Wieland, Eschenburg, 1762-84) on the one hand, and 
Schiller's adaptation of Macbeth (1800) on the other. 
The former, in obedience to a significant tradition, 

1 See a striking estimate of it in Brandes' Hauptstromimgen 
(German translation, t. ii., pp. 61-64). Schlegel translated seventeen 
of the plays ; the remainder were mainly adapted by Tieck from 
earlier translations. It is generally admitted that Schlegel's part 
is greatly superior to the rest. 



298 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

are in prose, and accentuate the purely dramatic and 
observant side of Shakespeare's genius. The latter is 
in verse, and of set purpose strikes out all the harsher 
and, as Schiller would have said, the coarser elements 
of the original, all that savours too closely of the soil, 
replacing them by idealisms which no English reader 
can contemplate with patience. The " rump - fed 
ronion" is banished ; the witches, washed and combed, 
are transformed into graceful girls ; 1 the Porter is a 
converted sinner who sings a morning hymn while 
Duncan is murdered within. Tieck and Schlegel 
steer clear of both these extremes. They preserve 
the poetry of the great dramatist ; but they preserve 
also his delight in all sides of human nature, all 
that makes him the resonant echo of the England of 
Elizabeth. This was the healthy strain — an enemy 
might say, the lucid interval — in the romantic 
enthusiasm. And it contrasts altogether favourably 
with the insipid refinements of the classical Schiller. 

In the other two cases it is not the treatment 

but the choice of subject that calls for comment. 

What drew Schlegel to the translation 

Calderon. 

oi Calderon, it cannot be doubted, was 
precisely that which would have made most men 
hesitate to undertake it; the remoteness of the poet 
from modern thought and the temper of northern 
Europe, his fantastic genius, his absorption in the 
creed of Catholic Christendom. As if to put the 
matter beyond doubt, the play selected to open the 

1 In this particular freak Goethe would seem to have been an 
accomplice, if not the chief offender. See Gesprdchc, i. 275. 



GERMANY. 299 

series was La Devocion de la Cruz, — the very play 
which is most calculated to shock modern precon- 
ceptions, and which, in truth, is least defensible on 
dramatic grounds. Having induced his readers at 
the first gulp to swallow the camel, he justly reckoned 
that they would not strain at the gnats which he had 
in store. He had his reward. For the next five-and- 
twenty years the influence of Calderon on the drama 
and poetry of Germany is hardly to be overrated ; 
and, without prejudice to the rare intensity of his 
genius, it was by no means for the good. Neither in 
form nor substance can the Spanish Drama ever be 
more than an exotic in northern Europe ; and it was 
as an exotic — an exotic to be naturalised at all costs — 
that Schlegel and his disciples cherished it with such 
devotion. To admire it, and to teach men so, was one 
thing. To hold it up, both by precept and example, 
as a model for imitation, was quite another. 

With Don Quixote, no doubt, we stand on firmer 

ground. There is no country in Europe where, in 

the truest sense, it has not found a home. 

Don Quixote. . ,. 

The one thing to give us pause is the 
motive of which Tieck may reasonably be suspected 
in his choice. In the masterpiece of Cervantes he 
believed himself to have found a model of the " irony " 
which he had persuaded himself to regard as the soul 
of poetry. The theory of irony is hardly likely, at 
this time of day, to enlist supporters. What is 
more, the application of it to Bon Quixote is a grave 
injustice. It is not the absurdity, but the nobility 
and pathos, of his hero that Cervantes has at heart. 



300 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

And to treat his romance as an understudy of Sir 
Thopas is entirely to misread it. Nothing could 
better illustrate the unsoundness of the ironic theory. 

We turn to the creative work of the three writers ; 
and here the Schlegels are completely thrown into 
the shade by their disciple. The Ion of 
the elder brother (1802), the Lucinde and 
Alarcos of the younger (1799, 1802), these are the only 
imaginative works from their hand of which even the 
ghost can still be said to walk the earth. Lucinde 
had a " success of scandal," which its friends mistook 
for a badge of immortality. It may be described as a 
series of variations on the " Freigeisterei der Leiden- 
schaft" ; or as what Mademoiselle de Maupin might 
have been, had it per impossibile been written by a 
professor. The laboured pedantry of the performance 
was overlooked in its impertinence, 1 and the school 
broke out into jubilations over the rout of prejudice 
and respectability. Oddly enough, none was louder 
in praise than Schleiermacher, the chaplain of the 
school, as Schelling was its philosopher. His Vertraute 
Briefe uber Lucinde were composed to the honour and 
glory of the new evangel. At the close of his life 
Schlegel, with some hesitancy, confessed to shame 
at the offences of his youth; and Lucinde, which 
indeed never reached beyond its first volume, was 
excluded from his collected works. It is now read 
only by the literary antiquarian. 

If Lucinde gives us the sentimentalism of Romance, 

1 Not, however, by Kotzebue, who pillories both absurdities im- 
partially in Der hyperboraische Esel. 



GERMANY. 301 

Alarcos and Ion embody its mania for innovations of 
ion and form. Produced within a few months of 
Alarcos. eac j 1 ther on the Weimar stage, they 
present, as probably they were intended to do, a 
glaring contrast. Ion is adapted, with considerable 
skill but entire loss of poetic charm, from the well- 
known drama of Euripides ; and it is not uncharitable 
to suppose that the choice was largely determined by 
a desire to follow up the blow struck by Lucinde 
against the respectabilities. If so, the aim was ac- 
complished. Much to Goethe's wrath, the audience 
openly revolted against the free manners of the Greek 
gods. Against Alarcos no such complaint could be 
brought. The theme of the piece is aggressively 
Christian, and the heroine neither demands nor ob- 
tains from Heaven anything more compromising than 
vengeance. Here, however, the merits of the perform- 
ance end. The handling of the action and characters 
is feeble. The whole strength of the poet is lavished 
on the form. Terza rima, ottava rima, sonnets, asson- 
anced dialogue, are mingled, as with Calderon, in be- 
wildering profusion. The one thing lacking is the 
fire and passion of the master. 1 

If the Schlegels were barren in creative work, 
Tieck (1773-1853) was, at least in certain periods 
of his long life, extraordinarily produc- 
tive. Facility was, in fact, his besetting 
sin ; and it exposed him to the still more fatal 
defect which he shared with other members of 
his school, an entire indifference to the choice of 

1 It was received with shouts of laughter. — Gesprache, i. 234. 



302 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

theme. We confine ourselves to his earlier achieve- 
ment (1792-1808), and treat it without strict regard 
to chronological order. 

The drama is the field in which he touches his 

fellow romanticists the most closely, and it is with 

this that we begin. The most important 

Zerbino. . , . , . . ^ . ~ 7 . 

ot his dramatic pieces are Frinz Zerbino 
(1799), Genoveva (1799, first performed 1800), and 
Kaiser Octavianus (1804). Of all his works, Zerbino 
— "a journey in search of taste" — is perhaps the 
most brilliant ; giving free scope, as it does, not only 
to the fantasy, which appears more or less in all 
he wrote, but also to the wit which, by the nature 
of the case, was excluded from his more serious 
efforts, but which was undoubtedly one of his most 
notable gifts. It is a glancing satire on courts and 
kings ; still more on the literary fashions and critical 
dogmas of the " enlightenment." This, it must be 
confessed, is the weak point of the design. Writing 
when the triumph of Goethe and Schiller was at its 
height, Tieck takes up the quarrel of the Xenien 
and surrenders himself to the cheap amusement of 
pursuing a feud already decided beyond hope of 
appeal — a feud, moreover, which, even in the first 
instance, had reflected little credit on either of the 
parties. With this abatement, the satire is spark- 
ling enough. But, as is usual with Tieck, it is 
spun out to immeasurable length ; and the mixture 
of sentiment, the incessant love-warblings, the eternal 
blue flowers and golden heavens, are more than usu- 
ally out of place. 



GERMANY. 303 

Genoveva is a far more questionable venture, but it 

is no less characteristic of the author. In form, the 

play is hardly less variegated than Alarcos; 

Genoveva. , , . . & . . 

and the variations are drawn from the 
same source, with even less of apparent effort. In 
this respect Genoveva makes a landmark in the his- 
tory of the romantic movement. It is the starting- 
point of the vast influence wielded by Calderon — an 
influence which, as we have seen, made itself felt 
far beyond the borders of the school ; on at least 
one of Schiller's plays, and on the last act of the 
masterpiece of Goethe. Tieck, however, was not 
the man to content himself with mere manipulations 
of form — in which, indeed, Wilhelm Schlegel hints 
that he was but moderately proficient. The matter 
of the play is no less revolutionary than its manner. 
Always on the watch for new scenery, this time 
Tieck casts boldly back to the dark ages and centres 
his action round the battle of Tours. The Moorish 
and Christian camps, the battlefield, the beleaguered 
city, the feudal castle, all form part of the stage 
carpentry. And Saint Boniface — who opens the play 
with the bluff announcement, "I am the stalwart 
Bonifacius," and closes it with " Ora pro nobis, Sancta 
Genoveva " — is just as much a piece of stage property 
as the rest. The central figure, it will have been 
seen, is none other than Saint Genevieve, whose trials, 
long-suffering, and miraculous deliverance, not even 
excepting the wild doe who gives suck to her 
infant, are brought bodily upon the scene, with 
every accessory likely to draw tears from the spec- 



304 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tator. The legend is among the finest creations of 
mediaeval piety. But to dramatise it, to trick it 
out with the tinsel and limelights of the stage, is 
nothing short of a desecration. A rage for effect is 
the ruling passion of the whole piece. To this all 
dramatic truth, to say nothing of all genuine rever- 
ence, is sacrificed from beginning to end. Witness, 
on the one hand, the persistent use of the religious 
motive to revive the flagging interest of the audience. 
Witness, on the other, the impossible forbearance, not 
to say encouragement, shown by the saintly heroine 
towards her ruffianly lover: apparently with the 
sole object of allowing the author to play off his 
master-stroke, a love-and-flower scene, twice instead 
of once. 

Much the same faults are apparent in Octavianus, 

some of them in a yet grosser form. The plot is a 

repetition of Genoveva, or rather of Geno- 

Octavianus. 

veva grafted upon the Tale of the Man of 
Law, with a slip of Winter's Tale, terribly mangled in 
the process, laboriously inserted. The outraged wife, 
the wanderings in the forest, the benevolent wild 
beast, — this time an ape and a lioness divide the 
honours which in the previous play were monopolised 
by the doe, — all reappear among the ingredients of the 
piece. The author, however, was far too skilful a 
stage-manager to content himself with a mere replica 
of his earlier effects. We are transported to the Holy 
Land, we are plunged into the midst of a holy and 
highly romantic war. An unknown stripling fights 
single-handed against a Paynim giant, and hews him 



GERMANY. 305 

in pieces before the Lord. The Sultan's daughter 
incontinently does her duty by falling in love with 
the Christian hero, and, after the most approved 
pattern of romantic "ingenues," becomes an ardent 
convert to his faith, — improving, however, upon her 
model by subsequently working conversion on her 
father. The " historical " background, again, is of 
the gayest. A fierce battle against the Mussulmans 
is fought under the walls of Paris in the days of 
Dagobert. The allies of the French king are Eodrigo 
King of Spain — Roderick the Visigoth is presum- 
ably intended, — Baldwin of Jerusalem, the Emperor 
Octavian, and Edward King of England : a larger 
company of crowned heads, if we reckon the com- 
panion potentates of the opposite side, than has 
ever met before or since save in the coffee-house of 
Candide. We are, in fact, in the full tide of medi- 
aeval adventure ; we have all the absurdities of the 
Sowdone of Babylon without its naivete and without 
its simplicity. And here we come to the glaring 
incongruities of Tieck's method. This childish story 
is presented with all the elaborations of the most 
alembicated art. Ottava rima, sonnets, assonanced 
octosyllables — all the splendours of Calderon — are 
scattered about the play in unstinted measure and 
the most impossible connection. They burst out in 
the breathing-space of a duel. They spring from the 
lips of the comic characters who, even without this, 
are sufficiently out of keeping with the tone of the 
whole drama. If we imagine Launce or Lancelot 
breaking forth into Spenserian stanza or Petrarchian 

U 



306 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

sonnet, we can frame some notion of the absurdities 
here committed by Tieck. And this is the play 
which was hailed as the crowning glory of the 
romantic triumph. It would, however, be unjust 
not to add that among these lyric utterances are 
to be found the finest passages of the drama, and 
that some of them — for instance, the songs of Lealia 
and Eoxana in praise of the lily and the rose — are 
not altogether unworthy of the Spanish poet by 
whom they were inspired. 

What is the ideal, we ask, which lies behind this 
strange medley of calculated effects ? In the last 
The romantic resort it may be considered as a distortion 
theory of poetry. of the ideal proc laimed by Schiller and, in a 
far less exaggerated form, by Goethe, the ideal of Das 
Reich der Schatten. The matter of poetry, both Goethe 
and Schiller had been apt to plead, is a thing compara- 
tively indifferent ; everything depends upon the form. 
The instincts of poetic genius and the deep humanity 
which went hand in hand with them had saved even 
Schiller, much more Goethe, from pushing this theory 
to extremes. But in the hands of smaller men it 
became a dangerous weapon. The more remote the 
matter from the common life and the common sym- 
pathies of men, the larger, the romanticists seem to 
argue, is the room left for the free genius of the poet ; 
the easier is it for him to stand above his material, to 
play with it, to use it purely for the ends which his 
own fantasy dictates. Hence it was that a theory, 
originally devised in the interests of the classical 
ideal, or what its authors took for such, came in the 



GERMANY. 307 

end to be used for a directly opposite purpose, to 
sanction the wildest caprices of romance. In this 
sense it may fairly be said that, both by action and 
reaction, the severities of the classical revival were 
the direct cause of the extravagances of romance. 
Schiller had led the way by disparaging the worth 
of human nature for the purposes of art. The 
romanticists might be excused for believing that 
they bettered his instruction when they trampled 
both humanity and nature under foot. 

The tale, long or short, came no less easily to Tieck 

than the drama or the lyric. It was in this field that 

he first won his spurs, it was here that he 

2\ovcls of Ti/Bck 

obtained his most indisputable success. Of 
his more elaborate works in this kind the most import- 
ant are Abdallah (1792-93), William Lovell (1792-96), 
and Franz Sternbald, 1 originally begun in concert with 
Wackenroder (1798). The two former may fairly be 
described as variations upon the same theme, but 
with wholly different embellishments. In each a 
youth, born with high aspirations, falls under the 
spell of a mysterious being who, with his own ends 
to serve, drags his victim deeper and deeper into 
degradation and crime. In the handling of this 
gloomy subject Abdallah, which is by far the less 
ambitious of the two, is also by far the more success- 
ful. The oriental setting, the visions and apparitions, 

1 This and the Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Kloster- 
bruders (1797), also the joint work of Tieck and Wackenroder, are 
singled out for attack by Meyer in Kunst und Alterthum (see above, 
p. 296). 



308 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the unblushing horrors of the close, are much better 
suited to the fantastic genius of the author than 
the futile domesticities of the modern replica. In 
William Zovell, linger as he may over his English 
gardens and his Italian cottages, he is forced at last 
to land us in the "diablerie" which, in spite of his 
more than Eadcliffian labours to account for it, is 
utterly out of keeping with the drawing-room senti- 
mentalities of the rest. Moreover, the dramatic 
weakness common to the whole school is here forced 
upon us in a peculiarly obtrusive form. The hero 
of the piece is justly defined by his evil genius as 
a "philosophic and inconsequent fool." If the word 
"criminal" had been added the description would 
have been complete. In such a character what 
probability is there, and what possible interest ? 

In the popular tale, the Volksmarchen, the author 
is more at his ease, and here his success is incontest- 
able. The type, of which he was almost the 

Popular tales. " * . 

creator, exactly suited his peculiar combina- 
tion of qualities : the wistful fancy, which never failed 
him, on the one hand ; the simplicity and command of 
natural incident and imagery, which belonged to his 
better moments, upon the other. To say that he 
equals the Grimms would be flattery. He uses a 
more elaborate pitcher, and he draws his water 
farther from the source. The taste of the rock 
where the spring rose is still discernible, but it is 
far fainter with him than with his great successors. 
The best of these tales is Der blonde Eckhart (1796) ; 
next to it, but at a long distance, is Der Pokal (1S11). 



GERMANY. 309 

In the critical writings of his after years, Tieck 
is extremely severe on the later outgrowths of 
romance, and that not only in Germany but in 
England and France. Much of his scorn, in par- 
ticular his sneers at Scott and Hugo, may be set 
down to jealousy. But, in condemning Werner at 
any rate, he might have remembered that he was 
passing sentence against himself. 

Among the writers of this group, Werner (1768- 
1823) is the most sincere and, as dramatist, the most 
accomplished. Unstable as water in char- 
acter, he found his one hold in a mystical 
religiosity which, starting from a strange and highly 
unorthodox blend of Christianity and Freemasonry, 
eventually led him within the fold of the Catholic 
Church (1811). It is this that gives the theme to 
most of his dramas, and supplies them with such 
interest as they possess. A long list of plays bears 
witness to this obsession. Attila and Leo the Great, 
Henry the Second and Saint Cunegunde, the found- 
ing of the Teutonic Order, the destruction of the 
Templars, the Hussite war, the revolt of Luther 
against the Papacy, — these constitute a fatally com- 
plete history of Latin Christianity, and are used 
by Werner, with the wildest contempt of all his- 
toric possibilities, 1 as so many texts for the glosses 
of his peculiar creed. All, with the exception of 
Cunegunde, were written before his conversion. The 
most important of them are perhaps Die Sohne des 

1 This reaches its height in Attila, who is represented as an ami- 
able blend of Solomon and Napoleon. 



310 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Thais (the Templars, 1801-2) and Martin Luther or 
Die Weihe der Kraft (1807). Both, like most of his 
other pieces, show a remarkable command of stage 
effect; the scene in which Charles V. and the mag- 
nates of the Empire defile before Luther at Worms 
being, in a melodramatic way, particularly impressive. 
But in both, the mystical vapour — the Baphometic 
mummeries of the one, the eternal hyacinths and car- 
buncles of the other — gives an air of unreality to the 
whole. In both, the determination of the author to 
employ his characters as the mouthpiece of his own 
mystical doctrines goes far to destroy the vigorous, if 
somewhat coarse, talent for dramatic portraiture which 
he undoubtedly possessed. And as that doctrine, at 
least in Die Sohne des Thais, involves a justification 
of wholesale lying and deception, he has justly been 
charged with confounding all distinctions of right 
and wrong. 

There is, however, one play in which Werner throws 

aside his romantic machinery and his adulterated 

, history, and trusts solely to his native 

Der vierund- . 

zwanzigste talent. This is Der vierundzwanzigste Feb- 
ruary a tragedy of peasant life, which 
was performed under Goethe's direction at Weimar 
— and again, under the guidance of Madame de 
Stael, at Coppet — in 1809, and published, with an 
amazing Prologue in which Goethe figures as Helios 
and Madame de Stael as Aspasia, in 1814. It is by 
far the least ambitious, and for that reason by far the 
best, of his dramas, — perfectly simple both in plan 
and execution. The curse of murder lies upon the 



GERMANY. 311 

beggared cottage where the scene is laid. Kunz, 
the peasant who owns it, has years before caused the 
death of his father. His son, as a mere child, has 
killed his sister in play. And now, as the fatal day 
comes round, Kunz, in despair and ignorance, robs 
and murders one who proves to be his son. The 
father, son, and mother, who are the only characters 
in the play, are sketched with a bold sweep ; the 
sense of overmastering doom is powerfully main- 
tained ; and the effect is, as it is intended to be, one 
of unmitigated gloom. The sole fault of the play — 
and it is perhaps less fault than misfortune — is to 
have set the fashion of the " Schicksalstragodien," 
which for the next few years, from the hands of 
Grillparzer, Milliner, and others, swept Germany 
like a deluge. These may have borrowed part, and 
that the most questionable, of Werner's apparatus. 
His dramatic truth, his grip of local surroundings, 
his command of tragic terror, they utterly ignored. 
Der vierundzwanzigste Februar, it is disappointing to 
record, was the last flash of Werner's genius. The 
" magnum opus " of his closing years, Die Mutter 
der Maccabder (1820), is a pure piece of religious 
sensationalism, not improved by imitation of Calderon 
at his worst. 

Novalis, the name assumed by Friedrich von Har- 

denberg (1772-1801), was bound by close ties of 

friendship to Tieck and the younger 

NovclUs 

Schlegel, and was deeply influenced by 
both. His romance, Heinrich von Osterdingen, is a 
graft from the " blue flower " of the former ; his 



312 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Aphorisms, from the Fragmente of the latter, to 
which indeed he was one of the contributors. The 
romance has all the characteristic qualities of the 
school. The story is childish, the sentiment over- 
powering, the atmosphere that of the hothouse and 
the thurible. It is the quips of Heine that alone 
save it from oblivion. 1 The same hectic flush is 
spread over his Hymnen an die Nacht, which, how- 
ever, contain passages of surprising beauty. The 
Aphorisms, on the other hand, have solid worth. 
They are always ingenious, often profound, and they 
are quite free from the aggressive conceit of the 
model supplied by Schlegel. They are, in fact, the 
subtlest and most suggestive record, which has come 
down to us, of the romantic theories. Had his life 
been spared, he would probably have produced finer 
and truer work than any of the brotherhood. 

The last of the romantic writers who calls for 
notice is Eichter (1762-1825). The English reader, 
who comes to his works with a know- 
ledge of all that Carlyle said in his 
praise and all that Carlyle owed to him, will be 
apt to feel bitter disappointment. He is not the 
Titan that he seemed to his Scottish adorer ; and 
even his humour is, too often, intolerably forced. 
Yet he has marvellous flashes both of humour and 
pathos; he has a startling subtlety of psychological 

1 Heine, Romantische Schide, Buch II. Heinrich was devised as an 
elaborate counterblast to WUhelm Meister, which Novalis denounces 
as "ein Candide gegen die Poesie gerichtet." Fragmente (ed. 1805, 
2 vols.), ii. 251. The same phrase occurs in one of his letters to 
Tieck ; see Holtei, Brief e an Tieck, i. 307. 



GERMANY. 313 

analysis; and, in his moments of inspiration, he 
has a depth of thought and feeling which, if we 
except Novalis, was denied to his romantic brethren. 
A selection from his writings could easily be made, 
and was in fact made by Carlyle, which would 
give the highest impression of his powers. But, to 
secure this end, it would be necessary to throw a veil 
over his deliberate surrender to the wildest caprice 
of a naturally unruly fancy, over his incapacity for 
sustained thought or imagination, over the amazing 
irresponsibility of his moral judgments. Of his many 
books, perhaps the most notable are Hesperus (1792- 
94), Siebenkas (1794-96), Titan (1800-3), Flegeljahre 
(1802-5), and Die Vorschule der jEsthetik (1804). And of 
these, Titan and Siebenkas are the most characteristic. 
The former is clearly an echo of Wilhelm Meister ; 
and that not only in its general motive, but in its 
attempt to paint the manners of high society, to 
which the author was admitted by a circle of adoring 
ladies, and in its supernatural mummeries, which 
prove to be a skilful manipulation of ventriloquism 
and wax figures. All this is as poor as can be ; and 
the plan of the book excludes those naive scenes of 
simple life which give charm to Quintus Fixlein (1796) 
and other tales of the same kind. But it is redeemed 
by some fine, if somewhat vague, passages of natural 
description, which manifestly inspired certain well- 
known pages of Sartor Resartus. The merits of Sieben- 
kas are of a far higher order. It suffers, towards the 
end, from a severe outbreak of the romantic lunacies ; 
it is swollen by distracting digressions, and even the 



314 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

main thread of the story is unduly spun out. It has, 
however, the simplicity and sincerity in which Titan 
is conspicuously lacking ; and, painting as it does the 
struggling life in which the author was bred and 
which it would have been well for him never to have 
deserted, it gives abundant opportunity for the hum- 
our and the pathos, the keen observation and deep 
reflection, in which he excelled. That Carlyle should 
have placed it below Titan, especially when we con- 
sider that he owed to it far more than he owed to 
Titan, is one of those caprices which defy all rational 
explanation. 

Two remarks may be added about the more general 
aspects of Bichter's work. As a humourist, he has 
been compared with Sterne and with 
Carlyle. And doubtless he has affinities 
with both. There is, however, a significant differ- 
ence. His humour lies for the most part in the 
collocation of incongruous ideas and images — the 
latter laboriously gleaned and treasured up from his 
miscellaneous reading, a process piously recorded in 
footnotes which give his novels the appearance of 
Grote's History or a school edition of an ancient 
Classic. Of the sense of humour in character, 
with which both Sterne and Carlyle were richly en- 
dowed, he has comparatively little trace. The other 
point concerns his relation to the romantic school. 
Curiously enough, he began as a personal antagonist 
of its leading members ; hence his satire on Fichte, 
Clavis Fichtiana, originally published as an appendix 
to the first volume of Titan. A little later he became 



GERMANY. 315 

familiar with the brotherhood, Fichte included, and 
ranked himself as one of them, apparently not much 
to their liking. But, whatever his personal relations, 
he is a romantic to the core. Humour apart, he has 
all the vices and all the virtues of the school — both, 
perhaps, on an exaggerated scale. 

Goethe and Schiller on the one hand, the Eoman- 

ticists on the other, these between them went far to 

divide the literary energies of Germany 

Kotzebue. J 

at the close of the old century and the 
beginning of the new. There is, however, one 
writer who stood apart from both camps, a literary 
Ishmaelite, who received no quarter from either 
party and revenged himself by a popularity to 
which no other writer, with the possible exception 
of Goethe — the Goethe of Werther — could lay claim. 
This is Kotzebue (1761 - 1819), whose plays went 
the round of Europe, who for a long time was re- 
garded as the representative genius of Germany, and 
whose name has now passed into a byword for all 
that is flashy, hollow, and sentimental. His serious 
pieces deserve almost all the ill that has been 
said of them; and they deserve it in a surprising 
variety of ways. The mawkishness of Menschenhass 
und Bene (1789, known to readers of Thackeray as 
The Stranger), the childish sentimentalities of Der 
Graf von Burgund (1797), the wooden Schillerisms of 
Gicstav Wasa (1801), the cheap supernaturalism of 
his later ventures, — these do much to account for the 
contempt in which the author has been held by the 
critics. They show how completely he was the child 



316 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of fashion, dancing in turn to each of the tunes called 
by the fleeting fancy of the hour. But his comedies, 
and the comic interludes in his more solemn pieces, 
are a very different matter; they deserve praise far 
higher than they have commonly received. To litera- 
ture, in any high sense, they cannot pretend. But 
they are a startling instance of what dramatic instinct 
and mother wit can accomplish without it. Burlesque, 
farce, serious comedy, gay comedy, the comedy of 
manners, — in all he has produced excellent pieces ; 
pieces which may still certainly be read, and one 
would think even acted, with great applause. Nor is 
it only the coarser qualities of the dramatist that he 
possesses ; an inexhaustible fertility of invention and 
a keen eye for effective situations. He has also a 
ready flow of appropriate and lively dialogue, a pretty 
wit, and a rich fund of satiric, but not unkindly, ob- 
servation. His best pieces, apart from the burlesque 
on Friedrich Schlegel already mentioned, are perhaps 
Armuth und Edelsinn (1795) and Falsche Scham (1797), 
among the comedies ; Der Wildfang (1797) and Der 
Wirrwarr (1802), of the farces ; and Die deutsclun 
Kleinstddter (1802) as a comedy of manners. The 
last is still widely read in Germany, and Krahwinkel 
survives as a type of provincial narrowness. The 
play was avowedly suggested by La Petite Ville of 
Picard (1801). But the German carries off all the 
honours on a comparison. Picard's characters are 
conventional, and his satire not too good-natured. 
Kotzebue, on the other hand, knew provincial official- 
ism as Trollope knew the cathedral clergy; and his 



GERMANY. 317 

satire, laughable as it is, is entirely free from malice. 
After the war of liberation, Kotzebue deeply affronted 
the somewhat heated national sentiment of the day, 
and was assassinated by a student. The bitterest 
feeling was aroused on both sides by this unhappy 
deed. 

In parting from the romantic writers of Germany 

— and, for these purposes, even Kotzebue may be 

, reckoned in their ranks — it is right to 

Achievement of ° 

the romantic ask ourselves how much of permanent 
value they contributed to the literature 
of their country. In the field of learning and, 
to a less degree, in that of literary criticism, not 
only Germany but the whole community of letters 
is in their debt. When Friedrich Schlegel began 
his History of Greek Poetry, he entered on a task 
more original and more fruitful than he himself was 
fully aware of. He was among the first to treat the 
literature of a given country as a whole. He was 
the first to realise that this whole is no mere assem- 
blage of detached details, but a living tissue of thought 
and imagination. Still more fruitful was his work on 
the language and literature of India. For here it was 
not merely the scope of an old study to be enlarged. 
It was a new science, a new group of sciences, to 
be created. Comparative grammar and comparative 
mythology both sprang, and sprang within a few 
years, from the foundations laid by the author of 
Lucinde. In the field of imagination, it must be sadly 
confessed, the same praise cannot be awarded. The 
body of imaginative work produced by the romantic 



318 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

school was immense; its worth is little or nothing. 
In Tieck and Werner there are occasional gleams ; in 
Eichter and Novalis there are the scattered limbs of 
a true poet. But if we except Der vierundzwanzigste 
Februar — and that has nothing to say to romance — 
there is no single work which, as a whole, can claim 
even remotely to satisfy the imagination. And, if we 
ask the reason of this failure, we shall find it — so far 
as such weaknesses can be traced to anything but 
deficiency of genius — in the false conception from 
which these men deliberately started. Poetry, as they 
conceived it, is divorced from life, and withdraws itself 
into a region of pure fantasy. And such poetry, it 
may safely be said, is doomed from the beginning. 
The greater the talent that is put into it, the more 
inevitable, the more complete, is its condemnation. 
It may be said that it is the essence of romantic poetry 
to create a world other than that in which man's daily 
interests are cast. And this is true. But in all great 
romantic poetry this world of fantasy is knit, though 
it be with threads of gossamer, with the homely web 
of human experience and human cravings. It is so 
with the Ancient Mariner and Christabel ; it is so with 
Eviradnus and Gastibelza ; it is so with Erlkonig and 
Die Braut von Korinth. And it is because the crea- 
tions of Tieck and his fellow -workers offer no such 
echoes of reality that they have long ago been con- 
signed to the museum of literary curiosities. 

In the years immediately following the romantic 
carnival, a new stream of humanity was poured into 
the literature of Germany. The ideals which in- 



GEKMANY. 319 

spired the struggle against Napoleon found stirring 

contrasts expression in the lyrics of Arndt, of 

succeeding Korner, and of Uhland. A burning hatred 

of falsehood, the disillusionment which 

sprang from repeated failures in the quest of love, 

truth, and justice, are the source of the poetry of 

Heine. 

Apart from the work of Goethe, the most memor- 
able achievement of Germany during this period was 

Philosophy in the region of philosophy, — an achieve- 

— Kant. men t which, in the first instance, is bound 
up with the name of Kant. 

Kant (1724-1804) had almost reached the threshold 
of old age before he entered on the task which was to 
change the face of modern thought. The flower of 
his life had been spent in diligent pursuit of the 
orthodox philosophy of the day ; or, what in the issue 
was to prove more important, in that close study of 
mathematics, physics, and anthropology, which gave 
unrivalled authority to his subsequent utterances on 
the nature of knowledge and the processes of scientific 
thought. It was not until he was fifty-seven that the 
first of his great books, Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 
was published (1781) ; to be followed by Prolegomena 
zu jeder kilnftigen Metaphysik (1783), Grundlegung zur 
Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), Kritik der praktischen 
Vernunft (1788), and Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790). 
The two first of these are concerned with the problems 
of speculative philosophy ; the third and fourth with 
ethics; the last is largely devoted to a statement of 



320 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

his theory of the imagination. Of his remaining 
works, which among other things deal with Political 
Philosophy and the Philosophy of History, it will be 
more convenient to speak in connection with Fichte. 

The chief of these treatises, and that which may 
fairly be said to contain the germ of all the rest, 
Kritikder * s ^e KHtik der reinen Vernunft. And 
remenver- the subsequent history of philosophy has 
proved it to be, as indeed was intended 
by the author, a weapon of two edges. It is 
aimed on the one hand against the materialists; on 
the other, against the metaphysical dogmatism in 
which Kant himself had been born and bred : on the 
one hand, against Locke — or rather, those thinkers, 
mainly French, who, in building up a materialist 
system, had detached and expanded certain elements 
of Locke's teaching; on the other hand, against the 
school which for the last fifty years had dominated 
his own country, the school of Leibnitz as transformed 
by the influence of Wolff. And, as time went on, it 
became clear that Kant's own interest lay far more 
in the latter than the former object. 

Such, however, is not the impression conveyed by 
the earlier sections of the book ; and it is not the 

idealist direction in which its influence has told 

element. m0 st deeply. The most original part of 
the Kritik is that in which, basing himself on 
partial hints taken from Locke and, far more, from 
Hume, Kant insists on the elements contributed to 
experience & priori ; on the impossibility of deriving 
such conceptions as space and time, cause and sub- 



GERMANY. 321 

stance, from the impressions of the senses; on the 
necessity of the inference that they are brought by 
the mind to the process of perception, and cannot 
by any possibility have been subsequently abstracted 
from it. Yet, without these and other kindred con- 
ceptions, what would be left that we could call ex- 
perience ? Nothing but a vague mass of floating 
impressions, the " manifold of sensation M ; without 
connection, without order ; nay, in the strictest sense 
of the terms, without a local habitation or a name. 

But, having granted so much to the idealists, 
Kant is nervously anxious to guard against the de- 
Agnostic mand for more. If the & priori element 
element. j n knowledge be so great, if the constitu- 
tive powers of the mind be so deep-reaching, what 
ground, he asks himself, is there for denying that 
they enable us to arrive at truth concerning things 
which, ex hypothesi, lie beyond the present condi- 
tions of man's experience : concerning the nature of 
God, for instance, or the immortality of the soul? 
These and the like were the favourite themes of 
the Wolffian philosophy; and Kant's labours were 
largely prompted by the conviction that philosophy, 
so applied, was no better than pretentious ignorance. 
In virtue, however, of his Kritik — that is, his analysis 
of the powers and workings of the mind — he believed 
himself to have discovered the secret which was for 
ever to bar the way against such unprofitable dis- 
cussions. It is true, he argued, that objects are con- 
stituted, and that experience is ordered, by the creative 
action of the mind. But it is also true that, before 



322 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the mind can put forth these creative powers, some- 
thing must be given it to put them forth upon. And 
that something can only be given in sensation. Unless 
this condition be fulfilled, the mind is merely feeding 
upon wind, and deluding itself with its own empty 
dreams. Now, from the nature of the case, neither 
the soul nor God can ever be presented to the mind 
through a sensible intuition. And that is the reason 
why no argumentation can ever bring them within the 
range of human experience, nor ever supply the con- 
ditions which are indispensable to human knowledge. 
To ignore this is not only futile and misleading, but 
it involves the mind of necessity in a train of contra- 
dictions — the famous " antinomies of pure reason " — 
from which no human subtlety can find an outlet. 
Kant had started by proving that " intuitions, sensible 
impressions, without conceptions are blind." He ends 
by insisting that "conceptions without content" — a 
content given only in sensation — "are empty." 

Waiving for the moment the validity of this con- 
ception, we may pause to indicate its bearing on the 
prevailing current of opinion in Kant's 

Its sia 7iificci7hC€ 

day and in ours. As has often been said, 
in this part of his thesis Kant does little more than 
give philosophical form to the destructive arguments 
of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. For that reason 
he was denounced by Mendelssohn, the chief survivor 
of the deist philosophers in Germany, as the " great 
iconoclast " ; and, on like grounds, he has been hailed 
in later days as the true founder of the creed of the 
agnostics. Both descriptions are perfectly correct. 



GERMANY. 323 

And it is no small testimony, that his philosophy 
should have embodied tendencies which have pr< 
to be so firmly rooted in human nature and have 
wielded so deep an influence on the thought of the 
last five generations. True or false, it is certain that 
these opinions have never, either before or since, been 
stated with any approach to the precision or cogency 
which they receive from the hands of Kant. 

Yet the conclusion itself, it will be admitted, is 
disputable. Still more disputable are the arguments 
its inconsist- by which it is supported. These may 
Z e ;:" r roughly be reduced to two. In the first 
Ms theory. place, we have the contention that all 
knowledge is limited by the senses, and that it is 
a fallacy to draw inferences from that which we 
have experienced through sensible intuition to that 
which can never become the object of such a pro- 
cess. Does Kant himself, we are compelled to ask, 
observe this principle ? Does he not himself insist on 
the necessity of passing behind the objects which the 
mind has constituted out of sensible impressions to 
forces — attractive, electrical, and the rest — which can 
surely never become the object of sensible intuition, 
which are arrived at by a purely intellectual infer- 
ence ? It may be perfectly true that the inference 
by which we conclude the existence of such forces 
is a more cogent and certain inference than that 
by which we argue to the being and nature of God. 
But the difference is one of degree rather than of 
kind. It does not lie in the fact that the former are 
presented to us in sensible intuition and the latter 



324 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

not. In both cases alike the mind passes beyond 
the mere sensible intuition to that which, rightly or 
wrongly, is held to be implicitly contained in it. 

But another argument lies behind. It is unlikely 

that Kant would ever have committed himself to the 

_ , above position had he not from first to 

Due to a r 

survival of last been haunted by the distinction be- 
tween "phenomena" and "noumena," be- 
tween " appearances " and " things in themselves," 
which he had inherited from the past, but which is, 
in truth, incompatible with all that is most original 
and vital in his speculation. To the pure idealist, 
to the Platonist, the " noumenon," the " thing in 
itself," has an intelligible meaning. To the pure 
materialist "the thing in itself," though not the 
"noumenon," may have an intelligible, if a very 
different, meaning. To the former it represents 
that world of thought, of reality, which stands over 
against the world of appearance, and to which, by 
an intense effort, the mind of man is capable of rising, 
either habitually or in moments of exceptional ex- 
altation. To the latter it represents that which lies 
altogether outside of the mind, and independent of it ; 
that which, being external to the miud, is the true 
cause of all that constitutes our experience ; that 
which, for want of a more accurate term, may be 
described as brute matter. 

But, to one who thinks as Kant does, what possible 
meaning is left to the " thing in itself " ? It cannot 
mean the world of pure thought. For, according to 
Kant, apart from sensible intuition — here ex hypotJiesi 



GERMANY. 325 

excluded — such a world neither has nor can have 
any existence. Nor, again, can it represent that 
which lies outside of the mind. For it is the essence 
of his doctrine to insist that nothing can come within 
the purview of the mind except that which, originally 
given " blindly " in sensible intuition, has been 
stamped with the forms, intuitional and intellectual, 
imposed by the mind itself. All that stands in 
relation to the mind at all, stands so because it con- 
forms to the conditions under which alone the mind 
is capable of working. Nothing which does not so 
conform can be conceived by the mind as having any 
existence whatsoever. Even to speak of the " thing 
in itself" — much more to speak of it, and therefore to 
define it, by way of contrast with the "phenomenal" 
— is to bring it within the borders, and therefore under 
the conditions, of the phenomenal ; to describe it in 
the same breath as both in and out of relation to our 
experience. It is, as Heine wittily said, an Irish bull 
in philosophy. 

So presented, the "thing in itself" has just enough 

of reality to put us out of conceit with the world of 

itsconse- actual experience. It has not enough to 

f^yZoiLd Ornish any effective substitute for that 

by Kami. which it has discredited. It is a ghost 

invoked to throw doubt upon the records of our 

waking hours ; yet, as soon as we seek to grasp 

it, it proves still more impalpable than they. It is 

of power to reduce all experience, all science, to an 

illusion ; it is not of power to put any substance in 

their place. 



326 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

From this result it would seem impossible to 
escape. Yet we may be very sure that it was not 
the result intended by Kant. On the contrary, he 
would seem to have regarded a reference to the un- 
knowable "thing in itself" as the one safeguard for 
the reality of "appearances." Having concluded, in 
the first part of his argument, that the world is 
known to us only under the conditions imposed by 
our senses on the one hand and our understanding 
on the other, he takes alarm at his own boldness. Is 
not this, he seems to argue, to reduce the world to 
a mere appearance, created by the particular organism 
of the human body and the human mind ? And if 
so, what is to assure us that this creation is not a 
mere illusion ? Can we not save " appearances " by 
positing something, unknown and unknowable, which 
corresponds to them, outside of ourselves and in 
reality ? 

To vindicate the reality of the known by assuming 
something unknown and unknowable, to save appear- 
ances by supposing something which does 
ku specula- not even reach the dignity of the " appar- 
ent," is no very hopeful way out of the 
difficulty. But it is at least an honest attempt to face 
the central problem of speculative philosophy. And it 
is the supreme merit of the " transcendental Analytic " 
to have once more brought that problem to the front, 
to have presented it in an entirely new light, and to 
have insisted on the urgency of its solution. Kant's 
own solution, it is true, can hardly claim to be satis- 
factory. The general effect of it was to leave him face 



GERMANY. 327 

to face with a dualism: the world of mind on the 
one hand, the world of reality — one is almost tempted 
to say, the world of matter — on the other. And 
from this dualism he himself was never able to 
escape. To get rid of one of the two discordant 
elements — the element which is not mind, — to prove 
that the world is of one "seamless texture," that 
it is solely the work of reason, — that reason which 
is in man but yet above man, which appears in 
time but is itself eternal, — was the ceaseless effort 
of his successors. But whether the task proved 
more possible to the disciples than to the master, 
is a doubtful matter. 

In passing to Kant's ethical system, we are at once 

struck by a difference of temper. The dualism of the 

speculative treatise is, indeed, still there. 

His Ethics. _ r 

It appears in the sharp contrast between 
the " free " will and the " pathologically affected " will ; 
between the " categoric imperative," which commands 
nothing in particular, and the endless complexity of 
man's actual duties. It declares itself in the embar- 
rassment which Kant betrays when he seeks, as he 
could not but seek, to fling a bridge from the one 
region to the other. But, while in speculative matters 
the scale is heavily weighted against the originative 
powers of the mind, in matters of conduct he 
declares himself unequivocally for the "autonomy 
of the will." More than this, he recognises that 
certain speculative " postulates " are involved in the 
admission of that autonomy, in the acceptance of a 
moral law as unconditionally binding upon man. 



328 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

And among such postulates he hastens to reckon 
those which he had explicitly excluded from the ken 
of speculative reason — the existence of God and the 
immortality of the soul. It is quite true that these 
postulates are referred not to the idea of autonomy 
itself, but to certain conceptions which, in Kant's 
view, formed a necessary complement to it: to the 
conception of happiness, as the just reward of 
goodness ; to the conception of infinite perfectibil- 
ity, as necessarily bound up with the commands of 
a moral law which, under existing limitations, it is 
beyond man's power fully to obey. And it may 
fairly be questioned whether such conceptions are 
in truth as necessary as they appeared to Kant. 
These objections, however, are hardly to the point. 
It remains true that Kant himself honestly believed 
the above conceptions to be necessary; and that, 
given their necessity, they do inevitably involve the 
postulates of which he speaks. 

That being so, it is clear that the ethical system of 

Kant gives back to reason no small part of the ground 

More consist- which his speculative system had taken 

en-Uy idealist. f rQm j t J n f act? t ] ie g rgt ser i ous blow 

dealt at the " iconoclasm " of the earlier treatise came 
from the hand of the iconoclast himself. This, how- 
ever, is apart from the main issue of ethical inquiry. 
But here, too, Kant is no less decisively idealist. And 
the enduring value of his moral doctrine lies in his 
uncompromising rejection of all hedonist or utili- 
tarian theories ; in his assertion of duty as the 
guiding principle of man's conduct; in his refusal 



GERMANY. 329 

to explain away the idea of duty by identifying it 
with a " moral sense," or enlightened self-interest, or 
a refined species of pleasure, or with any other of 
the equivalents suggested in his own day or since. 
It may well be that, in his crusade against these 
specifics, he suffered himself to be led into positions 
which it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to defend. 
The assertion that an act ceases to be morally good, 
directly a sense of pleasure enters into the motive 
of the agent, leads directly to an asceticism — not to 
say, a pharisaism — which is intrinsically unsound, 
and which Kant himself can hardly have intended. 
The formula, again, to which he reduces the moral 
law is so abstract as to leave no room for the ex- 
istence of specific duties, much less for that progress 
in man's conception of such duties which, as Hegel 
and others were to point out, is inseparably bound 
up with the development of his corporate energies, 
of the concrete institutions of particular communities 
and states. 

All this may be allowed ; and it was the work of 
Kant's successors to point out these weak places in 
TJ . . .. his argument, to bring down his theory 

His significance © o j 

to the life of from heaven to earth. But, after all, the 
main thing needed when Kant entered on 
his campaign was to redeem the idea of duty from 
the motley disguises in which it had been clothed 
by Helvetius and Bentham, with their theories of 
material satisfaction, on the one side ; by the pietists, 
with their doctrine of spiritual happiness, upon the 
other. And it is probable that few things contrib- 



330 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

uted so much as the moral side of Kant's teaching 
to enhance man's belief in his own dignity ; to give 
him confidence for the creative work, whether in 
social reconstruction or in poetry, which lay before 
him during the generation that followed. If in his 
speculative theory he presents many analogies with 
Voltaire, in his moral doctrine, and in the religious 
belief which is closely connected with it, he offers, 
though with an added touch of sternness, some re- 
semblance to Rousseau. He draws into explicit con- 
sciousness that conception of reason, as a creative 
faculty, which we have seen to be implicit in the 
ideas of Burke, and which, in fact, lay at the very 
heart of the romantic movement. 

It remains only to speak of his theory of the imagin- 
ation, as worked out in the Kritik der Urtheilskraft. 
mscesthetic Nowhere is he more original than in this 
theory. gg^j f j^g i n q U i r y . nowhere is his genius 

for analysis more powerfully displayed. Following 
an old tradition, recently revived by Burke, 1 he 
begins by distinguishing between the sense of the 
beautiful and that of the sublime. Under one or 
the other of these, he argues, all the energies of the 
imagination must necessarily fall. 

The beauty of an object, he holds, whether in 
nature or in art, consists not in its appeal to the 
moral side of our being, nor again in the satisfac- 

1 Burke's Treatise was well known to Kant. See Urtheilskraft, 
1st edition, pp. 126-129. It was also well known to Lessing, who 
made some interesting notes upon it (1758), and who would seem to 
have been influenced by Burke's discussion on Poetry and Words 
(Part V.) See Lessing's Werke (ed. Goring), xix. 202-6. 



GERMANY. 331 

tion which it offers to our intellect ; not in its 
power of touching our feelings, as men 

The beautiful r . . p 7 

among men, nor in its perfection, as pre- 
senting the fulfilment of a given end in the world 
of nature. The latter, indeed, cannot altogether be 
excluded. For it is an inseparable quality of beauty 
to suggest the fulfilment of an end ; though what that 
end in particular may be, is left wholly undetermined. 
With this qualification, it remains true that the essence 
of beauty lies in its capacity for arousing the free play 
of our imagination and, in a sense to be defined later, 
of our intellectual powers also. And that capacity it 
is impossible for us to analyse further. The field of 
beauty, accordingly, lies not so much in the forms 
offered by the world without, as in the workings of 
man's mind, — in the unconstrained and harmonious 
energy of his mental faculties. Its raw material, 
indeed, is necessarily drawn either from the world of 
man or the world of nature. For these are the only 
worlds of which we have experience, or which offer 
anything determinate for the mind to feed on. The 
imagination, however, uses them simply as material ; 
as a storehouse of images which it is free to recon- 
struct according to the instinctive promptings of its 
own fantasy. And to the imagination they assume 
a content entirely different from that which they offer 
to our moral or intellectual experience. Indeed, the 
more freely they are handled by the imagination, the 
more completely they are emptied of all association 
with our ordinary experience, the more pure and the 
more legitimate is their appeal to our sense of beauty. 



332 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Very different in its working is the sense of the 

sublime. In the last resort, it is based on the deepest 

moral instincts of man ; upon his con- 

The sublime. . . r . 

viction of his freedom, ot his power to 
bid defiance to danger and to fate. Before he can 
fully rise to this conviction, however, it is neces- 
sary that he should himself be free from the danger 
which arouses it ; that he should face terror not 
as a pressing reality, but by an effort of reflection 
and imagination. It is only when he is beyond 
the range of personal peril, when he looks on 
the raging of the elements from a place of safety, 
when he contemplates the heroism which for the 
moment he is not called upon to share, that he can 
truly be said to enter into the secret of the sublime. 
Then, and then only, can he realise the vastness of 
the natural forces at work around him, or bring home 
to his imagination the grandeur of the energy which 
nerves the will to conquer fear or to endure without 
quailing the most cruel buffetings of fortune. These 
are admitted by most thinkers to be the two sources 
of the sublime. Their only omission has been the 
failure to recognise that both, in the last resort, de- 
pend upon the autonomy of the will ; upon the power 
of reason, as a practical faculty, to reject all prompt- 
ings from without, and obey only that law which it 
imposes on itself. 

The one other point in Kant's aesthetic theory 
which there is need to mention is his insistence on 
the universality — or, to speak more correctly, the 
"general validity" — of imaginative judgments. In 



GERMANY. 333 

every case, he urges, when we make such a judg- 
7 MJ . ment, we make it not for ourselves only, 

General validity * 

of aesthetic but for all who claim to be u men of 
JU gm taste.'' This is our instinctive and invari- 

able assumption ; and that our judgments, in this as 
in other matters, are liable to error, is no argument 
against it. The fact, indeed, is not to be disputed; 
and all attempts to explain it away are foredoomed 
to failure. Even the man who professes merely to 
record his personal impressions bewrays himself in 
doing so ; for why, unless with the object of making 
converts, should impressions be recorded ? The real 
difficulty lies in accounting for the fact, in discovering 
the speculative ground on which it rests. And on 
Kant, who was more keenly alive than most men to 
the individual, the " subjective," nature of imaginative 
judgments, this difficulty was bound to press with 
peculiar force. 

Subjective, he admits, such judgments undoubtedly 
are. For they are a creative act of the mind; they 
Relation of call into being that which has no exist- 
arttoiife. ence — as? i n som e sense, the objects of 
intellectual knowledge may be said to have exist- 
ence — independent and apart. Individual they are, 
and that in a double sense. They are formed con- 
cerning individual images, which defy all attempts 
to bring them under general laws ; and they are 
always my judgment — not that which I have taken, 
or can take, on authority from others. Hence the 
inevitable divergence between one man's verdict and 
another's. Yet, in spite of this, they point to a 



334 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

"common sense," widely, if not universally, diffused 
among mankind ; a sense which, moreover, is one of 
the chief bonds of union between men widely separ- 
ated by age and race and social institution. They are 
not themselves the offspring of the intellect ; nor are 
they based, save in a quite secondary sense, upon the 
laws of thought without which there would be no such 
thing as knowledge. Yet, in a thousand ways, they 
draw upon the world of intellectual experience ; they 
suggest vast ranges of thought which lie on the verge 
of that experience, but which the intellect, as such, is 
powerless to enter. And being creative — as the pro- 
cesses of intellectual thought are not — they spring 
from the supreme faculty of man's spirit ; the faculty 
which, under one form, enables him dimly to appre- 
hend ideas, such as that of absolute being, which lie 
wholly beyond his actual or possible experience ; and, 
under another form, constitutes that which is highest 
and most distinctive in his experience, the world of his 
moral freedom. Here — in the free quickening of our 
energies, in its power to call the whole of our being, 
and not least the more spiritual and subtler elements 
of it, into play — is the true function of the imagina- 
tion. Here, and not in any definite "lesson," moral 
or intellectual, is the point where art touches the most 
familiar experience of life. 

The most obvious service of Kant in this field is to 

have freed the imagination from bondage to the sup- 

signijicance of posed moral needs of man; to have given 

Kant's theory, ft a w j]j f j ts 0WDj an( j a kingdom in which 

to work out its inalienable rights. His, said Hegel, 



GERMANY. 335 

was " the first rational word spoken on the subject." l 
And, when we remember the havoc wrought by the 
moralists in aesthetic theory and criticism, we cannot 
deny the verdict to be just. No previous philosopher 
in modern times had recognised so decisively that the 
imagination is not there to teach a moral lesson. None 
had approached him in the power of laying bare the 
speculative grounds on which the independence of the 
imagination is to be explained, nor in the genius with 
which he tracks out and analyses the subtlest work- 
ings of the artistic sense. After him, little remained 
for the theorist save to bridge the gulf which he had 
left between the imagination and the world from 
which it draws its material; to define more precisely 
the relation between the imagination and the common 
reason of man ; and to work out, in greater detail and 
with a fuller wealth of illustration, the specific func- 
tions of the several arts and the progressive stages of 
their historical development. The two first of these 
tasks were, in some measure, carried out by Schiller. 
The last, together with a far more complete and preg- 
nant treatment of the whole, was reserved for Hegel. 

The contributions of Schiller in this matter belong 
to the years 1792-95. The most important of them 
are Anmuth und Wilrde (1793) and Die 
JEsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, a series 
of letters originally written to the Duke of Augusten- 
burg in 1793-94, but recast in the latter year, and 
published in 1795. These, like all his other writings 
in this vein, are avowedly based on the philosophy of 

1 Geschichte der Philosophic, iii. 543. 



336 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Kant, and without the Kritik der Urtheilskraft they 
could hardly have taken rise. At the same time, 
alike in their phraseology, in their somewhat hazard- 
ous " construction " of history, and in their per- 
sistent moral preoccupation, they betray something 
of the influence of Fichte, whose acquaintance he 
made early in 1794. 

The first aim that Schiller seems to have set be- 
fore himself was to find an "objective basis" for 
The objective that sense of beauty which Kant had pro- 
basis of beauty. nounce d to consist solely in the subjective 
activities of the mind ; to determine whether any 
recurrent quality is discernible in the objects which 
habitually stir the imagination to activity. 1 Such 
a quality he believed himself to discover in "free- 
dom " or " vitality " ; that is, in the impression of a 
free play of vital forces which we seem to derive 
from those objects — the form and, in particular, the 
face of man, for instance — to which we are apt to 
attribute the highest beauty. This explanation, which 
was virtually adopted by Hegel, doubtless accounts 
for much ; and, so far as it goes, it may be accepted. 
But it is clear that there are many cases — music, for 
instance, and landscape, whether in nature or paint- 
ing — which it fails to cover. And we may suspect 
that to be the reason why Kant, to whose " subjective M 
analysis it is the obvious counterpart, left it on one 

1 Den objektiven Begriff des Schonen, der sich eo ipso auch zu 
einem objektiven Grundsatz des Geschmacks qualificirt und an 
welchem Kant verzweifelt, glaub' ich gefunden zu haben. — Letter 
to Korner of Dec. 21, 1792. Briefivechsel mit K'&rner, t. ii., p. 355. 



GERMANY. 337 

side. It is to be noted, moreover, that Schiller 
himself does not insist upon it as, considering its 
importance, he would have been likely to do, had 
he felt sure of its validity. 

In considering the bearing of imaginative art 
upon the intellectual and moral life of man, he dis- 
^sthetische P la y s g reater confidence. This, in fact, is 
Emehung the main subject of his most elaborate 
treatise, the JEsthetic Letters. And it is 
round this that he groups the most significant of 
his thoughts upon the nature of art. Art is to 
him, both for the individual and the race, the 
first schoolmistress of man — the chief agency which 
leads him from barbarism to civilisation, from the 
bondage of the senses to the freedom of the spirit. 
This it does, because it contains within itself — and 
that, not as derived, but as original energies — the 
two elements from which the whole life of man, 
lower as well as higher, is ultimately drawn ; the 
element of sense which, in another application, yields 
his physical life and the raw material both of his 
active powers and his knowledge ; and the element 
of form which, in another application, yields the 
freedom of his will and the laws which bind his scat- 
tered perceptions into a connected whole of know- 
ledge — in a word, that by which he impresses his 
own being and personality upon the brute matter 
given him from without. As fused in the imagina- 
tion, however, these two elements assume a dis- 
tinctive form — a form under which the identity of 
each is merged in an entirely independent energy, 

Y 



338 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

described by Schiller as the Spieltrieb ; the impulse 
which prompts man to abstract himself from the 
twofold world of knowledge and of duty, to leave 
his imagination free to play around them, to re- 
mould them according to his own fantasy. Accept- 
ing this impulse, in the first instance, purely as one 
of play, he identifies himself step by step with the 
ideas to which it has reference, becomes "native 
and endued into their element," and, what is yet 
more significant, acquires, from the mere act of 
playing with them, that sense of spiritual freedom 
on which the whole of his subsequent progress, in- 
tellectual and moral, ultimately depends. Thus his 
very play leads to earnest; his imagination does 
more to equip him for the serious work of life 
than either thought or action, as such, could ever 
have accomplished. 

The relation of all this to the theory of Kant is 
clear enough. And in one point— a point, however, 
its relation which belongs more immediately to ethical 
to Kant, xfozxL aesthetic doctrine — the disciple may 
be admitted to have corrected the master. Kant, as 
we have seen, had asserted that an act, to be pure, 
must be repugnant to the agent. Schiller replies that 
the very reverse is the case ; that, until obedience to 
the moral law has become an instinct, until it has 
passed into the very nature of the agent, the will 
cannot be said to have achieved its freedom. And 
it is because the imagination paves the way to this 
end, and indeed anticipates it, that its work in the 
general economy of man's life is so important. Kant, 



GERMANY. 339 

while acknowledging the " master hand " of his critic, 
was firm in rejecting his conclusion. But, in this 
instance, the poet was in the right and the philosopher 
in the wrong. 

No less clear is the relation between the JEsthetic 
Letters and the theory expounded some six years 
And to Die earlier in Die Kunstler. The Letters indeed 
Kunstier. are a cur i ous fusion of that theory with the 
doctrine of Kant. And it is manifest that, so far 
as he departed from Kant, Schiller was treading, and 
at moments became conscious that he was treading, 
upon dangerous ground. With all his efforts to 
avoid it, he betrays a constant tendency to saddle 
the imagination once more with the task of moral 
instruction of which Kant had striven to relieve 
it. And, in his endeavour to escape from this 
danger, he takes refuge in the opposite extreme, 
and declares it to be the mission of art to purge 
life of its harsh contrasts, to give back a softened 
echo of its passions, to raise man to a region in 
which the rush and strain of conflict are for- 
gotten. This is the prose version of the theory 
which the Realm of Shadows embodied in poetry ; 
which Die Braut von Messina, with more or less 
of consistency, carried out in practice. But it was 
not so that either the Greek dramatists or Shake- 
speare conceived of tragedy. 

On the whole, no reader of Schiller's critical writ- 
ings can fail to be struck with the clear grasp of 
philosophic principle which they reveal, nor with 
the extraordinary vividness of his exposition. His 



340 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

literary classifications are apt to be arbitrary ; his 
judgment of men and poems is uncertain. But he 
never writes without throwing a flood of light upon 
his subject; and, as a master of the more stately 
forms of prose, he has no rival among his country- 
men. 

With Fichte (1762-1814) we return to the main 
stream of philosophical inquiry. As has been said, 
the most pressing question bequeathed 
by Kant to his successors was this : Is 
it necessary to suppose something unknown and 
unknowable, outside of man's experience and cor- 
responding to his sensations ? or is it possible to 
regard all experience as one, and as an energy 
of thought ? Fichte was the first to take up the 
challenge, and he did so with a boldness which left 
nothing to be desired. 1 To him, the one thing that 
has reality is the thinking self; the whole world of 
experience is nothing more than the form through 
which that self at once asserts its freedom and 
gives itself determination. Thus the world of ex- 
perience is implicit in the self, just as the self be- 
comes explicit solely in and through the connected 
whole of its experience. 

We have here a resolute attempt to face the 
problem, left unsolved by Kant. But it 

Ji 1/S CLZvBlYljpZ ZO 

escape from is impossible to say that the answer 

Kant's dualism. rv> j i T7f t~j. • x.'£ tt 

onered by Fichte is satisfactory. He 
professes to deduce the world from the nature of 

1 Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre, 1794 ; Grundlage der 
gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, 1794, 



GERMANY. 341 

the self. In fact, he simply assumes its exist- 
ence, and proceeds to prove, what no one has ever 
doubted, how necessary is its existence for any pos- 
sible development of the self. How the self breaks 
its bounds, how it passes from its original emptiness 
to the fulness of knowledge and action, he was 
never able satisfactorily to explain. Nor, even if 
we admit him to have fulfilled the profession with 
which he started, has he really proved that which 
it was necessary for him to prove. The self of 
which he speaks, and which forms the starting- 
point of his whole theory, is explicitly declared to 
be the individual self, 1 this or that thinking in- 
dividual. And can it possibly be contended that 
the world, as the sum of objective experience, is 
to be deduced from a being whose powers are mani- 
festly to the last degree limited, and whose very life 
is to be measured not by aeons but by years ? 

The essential service of Fichte lies not in his 
performance but his intention. He saw that it is 
„. .' a the first duty of philosophy to take noth- 

Signifiwnce of j r l j 

his earlier and ing f or granted ; never to rest until it 

later writings. -, -, .« p -. •-, -, ,-, .. 

has proved, it proof be possible, the unity 
of experience, until it has traced all the constitu- 
ents of experience to the operation of thought. 
And, if he failed in his attempt, he at least freed 
philosophy from the shackles which, with all his 

1 Der theoretische Theil unserer Wissenschaftslehre . . . ist wirk- 
lich . . . der systematische Spinozismus ; nur dass eines Jedeu Ich 
selbst die einzige hochste Substanz ist. — Grundlage, Werke (Berlin, 
1845), i. 122 ; compare p. 110. 



342 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

greatness, Kant had never wholly been able to throw 
off: the habit of dividing the mind into water-tight 
compartments ; the habit, more appropriate to the 
natural historian than to the philosopher, of ac- 
cepting " matters of fact " — and this, too often, means 
merely matters of tradition — without inquiry into 
their origin. In this Fichte may fairly be said to 
have followed the speculative idea more faithfully 
than his master. And this side of his endeavours is 
aptly indicated in the new name which he suggested 
for philosophy: Wissenschaftslehre, the science of 
sciences ; a name which at least has the merit of 
insisting on the necessity of scientific thoroughness. 
In the popular writings of his later years — in par- 
ticular, Das Wesen des Gelehrten (1805) — Fichte fore- 
shadowed a theory which involved a notable departure 
from his original system. No longer taking the indi- 
vidual for his starting-point, he now finds reality in 
the " divine idea which lies at the bottom of all ap- 
pearance," and of which " the world of the senses and, 
in particular, the life of man as it is in that world," 
are the mere " appearance " or manifestation. To this 
theory, which presents obvious affinities with that 
simultaneously worked out by Hegel, he was never 
able to give philosophical expression. Its chief im- 
portance perhaps, at least for Englishmen, is that it is 
the theory which underlay all Carlyle's earlier writings, 
notably Sartor Resartus, and which, with many modi- 
fications — the most important being suggested by 
other passages in the works of Fichte himself — re- 
mained the corner-stone of his creed to the last. 



GERMANY. 343 

Schelling (1775-1854) began his career as the 

avowed disciple of Fichte ; and it was only by 

degrees that he worked his way to an 

Schelling. . 

independent, eventually a hostile, system 
of his own. 1 From the first, however, he shows a 
tendency to take the universe rather than the indi- 
vidual as his centre of speculation ; from the first 
he conceives of the relation between the individual 
and the outward world of knowledge as something far 
closer and more vital than had been possible for the 
purely individualist theory of Fichte. To the one, the 
ultimate analysis of man's being lay in a bare identity 
with itself ; to the other in " intellectual intuition," in 
the act by which man at once creates a world for him- 
self and sets himself to contemplate his own creation. 
This conception may raise as many difficulties as it 
solves ; but at least it frees man from the prison-house 
of his naked self, and sends him out into the world of 
nature, action, and art. And this, in fact, was the 
turn given by Schelling to the philosophy of his day. 
He conceived of man as existing only in and through 
a world of thought, action, and imagination. And he 
strove to grasp that world as, under diverse forms, the 
creation of one reason. As to the manifestation of 
reason in art and history, he contented himself, at 
least in his earlier writings, with scattered but often 
luminous hints. It was on the world of nature that 

1 Of Schelling' s numerous early writings, the following may be 
mentioned : — Ueber die Moglichheit einer Form der Philosophie 
iiberhaupt, Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, Philosophische 
Brief e iiber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus — all in 1795 ; Von der 
Weltseele, 1798 ; System des transcendentalen Idealismus, 1800. 



344 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

he put forth his strength. It is here that his influence 
was at once most pregnant and most misleading. On 
the one hand, by his conception of nature as one 
living organism of which all specific forms of life — 
and, through life, of matter — are but derivatives, it 
can hardly be doubted that he gave an impulse to the 
unifying process which must always be one of the 
chief aims of science, and which was never more 
actively pursued than in the days when the genius of 
Schelling was at its height. On the other hand, by 
his irresponsible manner of handling scientific laws, 
by his mystical vagaries and his dabbling in the occult 
sciences, he did all that one man could do to throw the 
ideals and methods of science into confusion. Yet the 
great service he rendered in freeing speculative phil- 
osophy from the formless void to which Fichte had 
consigned it must not be forgotten. Nor must it be 
forgotten that it was his writings which inspired, so 
far as any influence from without can be said to have 
inspired, the profoundest reflective poetry of Goethe. 

Hegel (1770-1831) was the last of a great line of 
thinkers ; for, though five years older than Schelling, 
he did not enter the lists, as author, till 
twelve years later. 1 In the last resort, 
his creed rests on the same foundation as that of 

1 With Die Phdnomenologie des Geistes, 1807. This is the 
earliest, and, if we except the Logik (1811-16), the most elaborate 
of his books. His previous writings, which, however, contain the 
germs of his later system, had appeared in Niethammer's Journal 
and other periodicals. The preface of the Phdnomenologie, besides 
a statement and defence of the method pursued in the body of the 
work, contains an attack on Schelling, p. 54. 



GERMANY. 345 

Schelling. But he grasps the central principle far 
more firmly, and carries it out with far greater 
patience and consistency. Starting from the inward 
necessity which drives man outward into a world 
of thought, action, and idealisation, he traces the 
first germ of this self-realisation — in thought, the 
bald consciousness of here and there, of this and 
that — onwards through the "whole series of its 
manifestations," to its fullest and ripest fruit in the 
thought, art, and civic ideals of the crowning epochs 
of man's history. This is the outward appearance, 
the Phanomenologie, of which the speculative counter- 
part is embodied in the Logik. With him, as with 
Schelling, the first step — the passage from the self to 
the not-self — may be hazardous enough ; though by 
insisting that the reason of man, however limited, is 
yet one with the reason of the universe — a point on 
which, both implicitly and explicitly, he is far more 
consistent than Schelling — he escaped the logical diffi- 
culties in which his predecessors, notably Fichte, had 
been entangled. But if that first step, and the yet 
more fundamental conception on which it rests, be 
granted to him, we find ourselves led on inexorably 
by a double dialectic — the logical dialectic of Hegel, 
the natural " dialectic " which he loves to trace in the 
evolution of human thought and action — to the goal 
where he is minded to have us. The personality of 
man, as distinct from the general order of the universe, 
may vanish in the process. The types of thought and 
ideal, which form the links in his chain of argument, 
may be arbitrarily selected. But, when criticism has 



346 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

done its worst, two things at least remain untouched : 
a speculative genius which, for subtlety, has never been 
surpassed, and a method which has revolutionised the 
whole spirit of modern thought. By no writer, either 
before or since, has the idea of evolution been applied 
over so vast a field as by Hegel ; and if we except the 
field of natural science, in the hands of no writer has 
it led to more fruitful results. It was the task of 
Kant to dissolve human experience into its elements. 
It was the aim of Hegel to trace it from its germ. 
This is the deep-reaching change which he brought 
into the intellectual temper of his time. 

It remains only to indicate the drift of what these 
writers achieved in two special subjects : political 
philosophy, and the theory of imaginative art. 

In the former subject, as in all others, the first step 
forward was taken by Kant. In his Rechtslehre (1797) 
Political tuary ^ e ^ s > indeed, f° r the most part bound 
of Kant. hand and foot to the individualist theory 

identified, not altogether justly, with the name of 
Eousseau. Elsewhere, again, he insists, far more 
explicitly than any of his predecessors had done, 
on that necessity of distinguishing between political 
and moral ends, of prohibiting the State from all 
moral functions, which lay at the very centre of this 
theory and gave it so strong a hold on the conscience 
of mankind. 1 Yet even here there are hints that he 
is feeling after a wider principle. And in another 
writing — it is true, still in the name of the individ- 
ualist theory — he sets forth with amazing clearness 

1 Zum ewigen Frieden, 1795. 



GERMANY. 347 

that conception of the State, and even of humanity, 
as a collective whole, capable of progress, which was 
destined to shatter the fabric of the individualists 
from top to bottom. 1 

But it is in Fichte that the onward movement 

in political theory is more clearly to be traced; and 

it is here perhaps that his services to 

OJFichte. ._ , 

philosophy are the most solid. Starting, 
like Kant, from the theory which is commonly 
understood to be that of the Contrat Social — in- 
dividualism pure and simple — he gradually worked 
his way to the conception of the State as an 
organism, the members of which are what they are 
solely in relation to the whole, and may be con- 
trolled, even to an extent that to most men would 
seem oppressive, in the interest of the whole. There 
are, moreover, in his later works two further concep- 
tions, familiar enough to the champions of the old 
order, but now for the first time incorporated in the 
speculative theory which reflected the needs and ex- 
perience of the new : the conception of the State as 
embodying the " permanent reason n of its members 
in opposition to their " occasional will " ; and the con- 
ception of nationality, as the indispensable basis of 
political union, — that conception which united Ger- 
many against the tyranny of Napoleon and, within 
the next sixty years, recast the whole map of Europe. 
The works in which the stages of this process are 

1 Idee zu einer Weltgeschichte in iveltburgerlicher Absicht, 1784. 
It is almost certain that this Essay, which does not fill more than 
a few pages, was known to Comte, and that he owed much to it. 



348 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

successively traversed are Beitrdge zur Beurtheilung 
der franzosischen Revolution (1793), Grundlage des 
Naturrechts (1796), Der geschlossene Handelstaat, a 
plea for the most extreme form of Protection which 
has ever entered into the wit of man (1800), Die 
Staatslehre (1813, first printed 1820), and the famous 
Beden an die deutsche Nation (1808). The two last 
may be described as Fichte's trumpet-call to the 
struggle against the common oppressor, in the course 
of which his own life was cut short. 

The conception of the State ultimately reached by 
Fichte is, in its broad outlines, that which was adopted 
by Hegel. 1 But it was purged by the 
latter of the fantastic history in which 
it was originally tricked out ; it was bent to the 
purposes of the conservative, not to say of the 
reactionary ; and, deepened by the reasoned con- 
viction of progress and the profound insight into 
the main currents of man's history, which we have 
already seen in his more speculative writings, it 
became inseparably linked with the Philosophy of 
History. Later writers have tried to improve on the 
effort of the master. But, in spite of obvious defects, 
Die Bhilosophie der Geschichte still remains a model, 
unsurpassed and unequalled. 

As to the further developments of aesthetic theory, 

Esthetic little is left to say. Fichte and Schelling, 

theory. eac h j n j^g own waVj may be regarded as the 

theorists of the romantic movement, as it was shaped 

1 Philosopkie des Rechts, 1821 ; Philosophic der Geschichte, published 
after his death. 



GERMANY. 349 

by such men as the Schlegels and Tieck and Novalis. 
And it is easy to see how the philosophic egoism of 
the one and the irresponsible mysticism of the other 
— quite apart from all personal reasons, which, how- 
ever, worked strongly in the same direction — naturally 
gave countenance to the carnival of caprice which 
broke loose on Germany during the romantic ferment. 
In particular, it may be noted that the conception of 
" irony " as the soul of imaginative art — a conception 
formulated by Friedrich Schlegel, and rapturously 
accepted by Tieck and others of his school — was a 
bastard growth of the philosophy of Fichte. 1 And it 
is a conception of which philosophy has no reason to 
be proud. 

Very different was the achievement and influence 
of Hegel. 2 Nurtured on Greek art and Greek phil- 
osophy, it was impossible for him to ac- 
cept the chaotic creations of the romantic 
brotherhood. And, if he has a bias, it is towards that 
side of contemporary poetry which was most antagon- 
istic to romantic ideals ; towards the "classical " revival 
of Goethe and Schiller ; towards the remoteness of the 
West-ostlichev Divan as against the passionate intensity 
of Faust. For all this, it remains true that, in art as 
in the more speculative aspects of his philosophy, the 
temper of Hegel is, in the wider and nobler sense, 
essentially romantic; and that he embodies, more 

1 See the numerous, and adoring, references to Fichte in the 
Fragmente of Novalis. 

2 The JEsthetik, like most of his works, is posthumous, put together 
from notes of the lectures delivered in the University of Berlin 
between 1818 and 1831. 



350 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

completely than any other writer, that conception of 
reason, as an intrinsically creative faculty, which we 
have seen to lie at the very core of the romantic 
revolution. And nowhere did he apply this concep- 
tion more fruitfully than in the theory of imaginative 
art. There the service which he rendered is beyond 
question. It is to have distinguished the functions 
of the several arts, and, at the same time, to have 
traced their growth from a common root. It is to 
have seized the essential moments in the historical 
development of each. It is to have held the balance, 
more evenly than any of his predecessors had done, 
between the form of art and the matter; to have 
brought art once more into connection with the vital 
realities of life without degrading it into their hand- 
maid ; to have fixed the place of art side by side with 
the other energies of man — with his impulse towards 
knowledge, action, and religion — as one of the abiding 
manifestations of the reason, the " idea," which works 
in and through them all. 

In leaving Germany, it is well to point out how 

evenly the literary genius of the period was distributed 

over the length and breadth of the land. 

Literary move- ° 

went common to Goethe came from the Rhineland, on the 

the whole race. . Tr - j tt j r lL t% • 

west ; Kant and Herder from the Russian 
border, on the extreme east. Schiller, Schelling, and 
Hegel were natives of Suabia, on the south - west ; 
Lessing and Fichte of the Lausitz, in the centre, 
towards the north-east. And, if we may include the 
musicians who are among the glories of the epoch, 



GERMANY. 351 

the few gaps left are at once tilled. Beethoven, born 
in the Ehine provinces, was ultimately of Flemish 
descent ; Haydn and Mozart belonged to the Austrian 
provinces of the south-east. In this sense, no less 
than in those indicated at the beginning of the 
chapter, the romantic revival was, in the fullest 
measure, an awakening of the nation. 

Consult the following, among other works : Scherer, Gcschickte der 
deutschen Litteratur (3rd ed., 1885) ; Robertson, History of German 
Literature (1902) ; Julian Schmidt, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in 
Deutschland von Leibnitz bis auf Lessings Tod (2 vols., 1862-64), and 
Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur seit Lessings Tod (3 vols., 1858) ; 
Hettner, Litteraturgeschichte des 18™ Jahrhunderts (6 vols., 4th ed., 
1893-94), and Die Romantische Schxde in ihrem inneren Zusammen- 
hang mit Goethe und Schiller (1850) ; Brandes, Hovedstromningr i det 
19 de Aarhundredes Litteratur (English Translation, 6 vols., 1901-5); 
Lewes, Life of Goethe (3rd ed., 1882 ; Diintzer, Goethes Leben (1850) ; 
Goethe, Wahrheit und Dichtung, Annalen, Italienische Reise, Brief e 
an Frau v. Stein (3 vols., 1848-51), Briefwechsel mit Schiller (2 vols., 
3rd ed., 1870), Brief e zioischen Goethe und Knebel (2 vols., 1851), 
Gesprdche (ed. Biedermann, 10 vols., 1889-96) ; Schiller, Briefwechsel 
mit Korner (4 vols., 1847), Briefwechsel mit W. v. Humboldt (2nd 
ed., 1876) ; Carlyle, Life of Schiller (1825) ; K. Fischer, Schiller- 
Schriften (2 vols., 1891-92), and Lessing als Reformator der deutschen 
Litteratur (1881) ; Haym, Die Romantische Schule (1870), and Herder 
nach seinem Leben und seinen WerTcen dargestellt (2 vols., 1877-85); 
Fr. Schlegel, Brief e an A. W. Schlegel (ed. Walzel, 1890); Holtei, 
Brief e an Tieck (4 vols., 1867); Heine, Die Romantische Schule 
( WerJce, ed. Elster, vol. v.) ; Goschen, George Joachim Goschen, Pub- 
lish^ and Printer (2 vols., 1903), Allgemeine deutsche Biographie 
(50 vols., 1875-1905); Caird, Philosophy of Kant (1877). 



352 



CHAPTEE III. 

FRANCE AND ITALY. 

LATIN COUNTRIES — FRANCE — CLASSICAL SURVIVALS : POETRY — DRAMA — 
NOVEL-REALISM — LA HARPE — THE TRANSITION : " LE DRAME " — 
TRAGEDY — INFLUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE — LETOURNEUR — DUCIS — 
COMEDY : BEAUMARCHAIS — FABRE D 'EGLANTINE — TRAGEDY : M. J. 
CHENIER — LEMERCIER : TRAGEDY — HIS COMEDY — DESCRIPTIVE 
POETRY — FOREIGN INFLUENCES — THOMSON — SAINT - LAMBERT — 
DELILLE — FONTANES — PARNY — INFLUENCE OF ROUSSEAU — FLORIAN 
— MERCIER: AS CRITIC — AS DRAMATIST — SAINT-PIERRE — MISCEL- 
LANEOUS WRITERS — RAYNAL — BUFFON — BARTH^LEM Y — GRIMM — 
MADAME D'F>INAY — MADAME ROLAND — CONDORCET — JOURNALISM 
— SIEYES — DESMOULINS — ORATORY — TYRANNY OF NAPOLEON — 
ROMANCE — ANDR£ CH^NIER — ' IDYLLES ' — FRAGMENTS OF ' SUZANNE ' 
AND * HERMES' — LATER POETRY — PLACE OF CH^NIER — MADAME 
DE STAEL — POLITICAL WRITINGS — 'CONSIDERATIONS' — ' DE LA 
LITERATURE ' : ITS ORIGINALITY — ANTICIPATIONS OF ROMANCE — 
'DE L'ALLEMAGNE' — INSPIRATION TO BE DRAWN FROM GERMAN 
THOUGHT AND POETRY — EXILE — HER NOVELS — HER RELATION TO 
ROMANCE— CHATEAUBRIAND — HIS RELATION TO ROUSSEAU : ' RENE" ' 
— 'ATALA,' AND LATER ROMANCES — ' LE G^NIE ' — CHATEAUBRIAND 
AS CRITIC — HIS IMPORTANCE IN THE HISTORY OF ROMANCE — 
JOUBERT, SENANCOUR — JOSEPH DE MAISTRE — HIS IDEA OF THE 
STaTE — OF SOVEREIGNTY : * LE PAPE ' — HIS RELATION TO BURKE 
— REACTION TOWARDS CLASSICISM — ITALY — SOCIETA DEL CAFFE 
— ROMANCE: CESAROTTI — 'FLLOSOFIA DELLE LINGUE' — BERTOLA 
— A. VERRI — CLASSICISM : PARINI — LATER ROMANCE : CASTI — 
I. PINDEMONTE — MONTI — ' ARISTODEMO ' — G. PINDEMONTE : JACOBIN 
DRAMAS — FOSCOLO : ' JACOPO ORTIS ' — ALFIERI — HIS GENIUS IN 
CLASSICAL TRAGEDY — GREEK AND HISTORICAL SUBJECTS — ROMANTIC 
ELEMENTS IN HIS PLAYS — SUBORDINATE TO THE CLASSICAL — HIS 
COMEDIES — HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 353 

The Latin countries were far more deeply in bondage 
to the classical tradition than either Germany or 
latin England ; and it was much later before 

countries, j^y were captured by the romantic move- 
ment. Accordingly, a slighter treatment will here 
suffice for our purpose; and the history of the two 
countries to be considered in this chapter will 
naturally fall under two heads: the survival of the 
classical tradition on the one hand, on the other the 
first beginnings of the movement towards romance. 

The place of honour, it need hardly be said, be- 
longs to France. It was here that the classical 
tradition had cast the deepest roots. It 

France. 

was here that the romantic reaction was 
most vividly declared. Over the writers who can 
fairly be said to have followed the classical worship, 
pure and undefiled, it is unnecessary to linger. The 
breath of life had already departed from their cult; 
and, since Eousseau, the vital tendencies were in the 
direction of romance. Alike in poetry, the drama, 
the novel, and the more miscellaneous forms of 
literature, new influences were astir ; and from these 
influences even the most hardened classicists were 
unable to keep themselves entirely free. 

In poetry it is perhaps enough to mention Gilbert 
(1751-1780), whose satires (Le podte malheureux, Le 
clerical sur- Dix-huitttme Sttcle, and others), largely 
vivais-Poetry. i ns pi re( i by hatred of the "philosophers," 
have a vigorous eloquence, moulded on the ap- 
proved classical models. Yet even he intersperses 
his attacks on Voltaire and Diderot with sneers at 

z 



354 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Boileau and other legislators of Parnassus; even he 
is infected by the romantic faith that the function 
of poetry is to " paint " ; and in his lyrical pieces 
writes with a sincerity of religious fervour which 
is still more decisively opposed to the classical 
routine. It would be indecent entirely to pass 
over Lebrun (1729-1807), the most inveterate, and it 
must be added the most servile, practitioner of the 
Ode, which he manipulated with all the cold fury 
traditional in that form of poetic exercise. In his 
own day, he went by the surname of Pindar ; now he 
is hardly remembered except by his versification of 
Barere's carmagnole on the loss of the Vengeur. 

In the Drama it is doubtful whether even this 
degree of vitality remained with the classical tradi- 
tion. Plays framed on the classical model 

Drama. . 

doubtless continued to be written, and 
written in plenty. But with rare exceptions — the 
PhilocUte of La Harpe (1783) is perhaps the most 
notable — the salt had gone out of them, and they 
are all now hopelessly forgotten. Since the Sdmi- 
ramis of Voltaire (1748), the prevailing current had 
flowed in other channels ; from that time onward all 
the marked tragedies had been fused more or less 
completely with romantic elements. And Tragedy 
itself bade fair to yield the palm to that mixed 
form, so dear to Europe in the latter half of the 
eighteenth century, which is known to French critics 
as Le Drame. 

With the novel there is, from the nature of the 
case, more difficulty of classification, Born with the 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 355 

first stirrings of the romantic instinct, the novel was 
romantic in its very essence. All that 

Novel-realism. . . . 

remains, therefore, is to distinguish be- 
tween the two streams of tradition; between that 
which came down from Le Sage, through Marivaux 
and Crebillon fils on the one hand, and that which 
traces its source to Eousseau, and through him to 
Prevost, upon the other. It is with the former 
alone — as that which, by courtesy, may be called 
classical — that we are here concerned. Under this 
head it is sufficient to mention two names : those 
of Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) and Eestif de la 
Bretonne (1734-1806). Both men survive by one 
book; both have suffered grievously from the sup- 
posed immorality of their work ; and both with some 
injustice. Les Liaisons Dangereuses of the former 
(1782) is certainly a most repulsive story. But, apart 
from one or two passages, it cannot fairly be called 
licentious j and the power with which the two leading 
characters, monuments of cold-blooded wantonness, 
are drawn is undeniable. There is probably no book 
which gives so vivid a picture of the social corruptions 
of the years immediately preceding the Bevolution. 
Le Paysan Perverti of Bestif (1776) can hardly lay 
claim to the same distinction. In literary skill it is 
infinitely inferior; and that inferiority is the more 
marked by the comparison which the author himself 
challenges with the Paysan Parvenu of Marivaux. 
But we are left with the impression that, at bottom, 
Bestif was possessed of surprising originality. Critics 
have pointed out that the villain of his piece is an 



356 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

anticipation of Balzac's Vautrin. And they might 
have added that, alike in his unsparing realism and 
in his design of " anatomising " the heart of man, " le 
moi humain," as formed by his social surroundings, 
he goes a long way towards forestalling the methods 
of La Comtfdie humaine. 1 And the same might be 
said of Pigault-Lebrun (1753-1835). It has been 
said that both Laclos and Eestif owe much to the 
influence of Eousseau. That, however, would appear 
to be a misleading affiliation; and, at the most, it 
refers to Eousseau only as he was in the most out- 
spoken pages of the Confessions. The real debt of 
both, in incident as well as method, is to Eichardson : 
Laclos working largely on the model of Clarissa, and 
Eestif on that of Pamela. But, when all is said, both 
writers stand apart from all that is vital to the 
romantic movement. Their tendency, especially that 
of Eestif, is towards realism rather than romance. 

Of miscellaneous writers, the only one who calls for 
notice is La Harpe (1739-1803). And here again we 

1 The passage is worth quoting. It occurs in the Preface to Le 
Drame de la Vie (1793), an extraordinary chain of connected plays 
in five volumes ; and it refers to that work and another, Monsieur 
Nicolas. " Voici l'ouvrage le plus extraordinaire qui ait encore 
paru. II est unique dans son genre. Publier la vie d'un homme ; 
le mettre en drame, avec une verite qui le fait agir au lieu de parler. 
. . . Je ne de*guise rien, mais je ne fais qu'esquisser ; au lieu que 
M. Nicolas est une anatomie complete du moi humain ; non seche 
et metaphysique, mais historique, variee comme la nature. On y 
verra la nature humaine demontee et mise sous verre, pour etre 
examinee, consideree, scrute'e par les philosophies et les lecteurs." 
One might almost fancy this, the fanfaronnade included, to have come 
from the pen of Balzac. But the promise is hardly carried out by 
the performance. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 357 

are met with some variance of opinion. La Harpe 
has passed into a byword, as the oracle 

La Harpe. •«■••■<■• -r* i •« 

or classical bigotry. But whoever will 
be at the pains to turn over his interminable Lycte, 
which consists of lectures delivered in the closing 
years of the old century and the beginning of the 
new, will see that even this feather must be torn 
from his cap. No doubt, he has a strong bias to- 
wards the classical conventions. Yet, both in theory 
and in practice, he hedges at every step ; * and it 
is almost a relief when the true man leaps out to 
attack Eousseau and Diderot with all the truculence 
at his command. 2 This, however, is not on grounds 
of form, but of matter; not as literary heretics, 
but as "sophists." In matters purely literary, La 
Harpe represents, so far as an ingrained pedant could 
represent, the more liberal mind of classical respecta- 
bility ; he has certainly little of the bitterness which 
the romantic defiance of 1830 provoked in his suc- 
cessors. And this, on the whole, is typical of French 
criticism as it was during the period under our con- 
sideration. At the beginning of the period (1775- 
1789) the Eevolution had already cast its shadow 

1 E.g., "C'est depuis Voltaire surtout que Ton a employe si 
souvent ce mot, gout, dans un sens absolu ; mais on en a abuse beau- 
coup, en voulant trop le separer du genie et du talent, dont il est 
cependant une partie essentielle et necessaire." — Lycee y t. i., p. 12 
{Pantheon Lit.) Contrast the defence of "les regies," which occurs 
two pages earlier. The whole work is full of these compromises. 
See the remarks on Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega — 
ib., pp. 7, 23, 432; on Saint-Lambert — ib., p. 595 ; and on Werther, 
t. ii., p. 738. 

2 lb., t. ii., pp. 834-971. 



358 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

before it. The political, moral, and intellectual issues 
which it raised were of such vast importance as to 
throw all else into the shade. And the same remained 
true when the storm had passed, and the work of 
reconstruction was begun (1795-1805). The literary 
issues stirred by the work of Chateaubriand passed 
comparatively without notice. It was as " restorer of 
the altars " that he was, in the first instance, either 
defended or assailed. It is manifest that this gave an 
enormous advantage to the party of literary innova- 
tion. Heresies, which a few years earlier or later 
would certainly have been challenged, now escaped 
almost without protest under cover of more sanguin- 
ary disputes. 

We pass to the writers who display more or less 
markedly the workings of the romantic spirit; those 
The transition who f orm the transition from Voltaire and 
— LeDrame. ^he classicists on the one hand to Andre 
Chenier, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stael upon 
the other. Among these writers, two groups stand out 
in sharp relief : the first, that formed by the descrip- 
tive poets ; the second, the direct disciples of Eousseau. 
Besides these, we have to consider the dramatists who, 
now as ever, filled the largest space in the eyes of the 
French public. It is with the last that we begin. 
In Tragedy, or what may pass for such, the first 
thing to strike us is the survival of the influence of 
Diderot. His immediate successor, Sedaine (1719- 
1797), had indeed crowned his work with Le Philo- 
sophe sans le savoir (1765) before our period begins. 
But he still continued to write romantic operas, among 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 359 

which, significantly enough, is one on Aucassin et 
Nicolette (1782). And, much to the rage of Voltaire, 
he even ventured on a set tragedy in prose — Maillard, 
ou Paris sanvi — which, thanks to the opposition it 
provoked, was not published until the year before the 
Eevolution (1788). What again could be more start- 
ling than to find the essentially gay genius of Beau- 
marchais devoted, both at the beginning and end of 
his career, to the composition of what he himself in- 
differently calls " tragedies bourgeoises," or " comedies 
larmoyantes " ? Eugenie (1767), Les deux Amis (1770), 
La M&re coupahle, an execrable continuation of Figaro 
(1792-97), have little or no intrinsic worth. But they 
at least serve to show that the French Drama was still 
moving on the lines which the great critic and im- 
provisatore had laid down. The same appears from 
Saurin's Beverley, an adaptation of Moore's Gamester, 
and Mercier's Jenneval, an adaptation of George Barn- 
well (both in 1768), together with many other Plays 
by the latter. But Saul also was destined to be 
among the prophets. And perhaps the surest proof 
that Le Pdre de Famille still continued to be a power 
is to be found in the surrender of La Harpe ; in his 
Bameveldt, a thin disguise for the importunate Bam- 
well ; still more in his Mdanie (printed 1770, first 
acted 1793). x Here we have the author of Philocttte, 

1 In the original version, and presumably in the performance of 
1793, La Harpe, then (as Chateaubriand calls him) " revolutionnaire 
eflr^ne," had sharpened all his weapons against the Church. For 
this reason the Play was vehemently praised by Voltaire : " L'Europe 
attend Melanie." In 1802, when he was as violent on the other side, 
he issued a revised version in which, so far as might be, he put 
buttons on his foils. 



360 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the reputed high-priest of classicism, deliberately tak- 
ing his theme from a burning question of the day — 
the whole drama is an impassioned plea against the 
iniquity of monastic compulsion — and decisively rang- 
ing himself among the advocates of domestic tragedy. 
We have him also adopting, on occasion, a versifica- 
tion which, in disregard of the caesura, forestalls the 
romanticists of 1830. These things are alone almost 
sufficient to destroy his reputation as a " classic." 
They are sufficient also to prove the change which 
had come over the spirit of French Tragedy. 

The same change, though in other directions, ap- 
pears in the tragedies of De Belloy (1727-1775) and 
of Lemierre (1725-1793), neither of whom, 
however, falls strictly within our period. 
The former, who is chiefly known for La Stige de 
Calais (1765) — so highly praised by Lessing, so 
offensive to Voltaire — habitually turned to national 
and, by preference, to patriotic subjects, thus open- 
ing a vein which was to be vigorously worked 
by the romanticists in his own country and in 
others. And it is significant that a later tragedy, 
Gabrielle de Vergy, printed in 1770, but first per- 
formed after his death (1777), dramatises one of the 
most terrible stories of mediaeval chivalry. Lem- 
ierre, like Voltaire, is eclectic and cosmopolitan in his 
choice of subjects ; but in his love of startling incident 
and vivid effects of the stage he shows himself no 
less romantic than De Belloy. And it is a striking 
proof of the change now passing over the taste of the 
French public that neither Guillaume Tell (1766) nor 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 361 

La Veuve de Malabar (1770) won much success until 
the apple and the suttee were brought bodily upon 
the stage — feats of daring accomplished respectively 
in 1780 and 1786, and denounced with pious horror 
by the orthodox editors of Le TMdtre Frangais. 

But the clearest sign of the romantic dawn is per- 
haps to be seen in the repeated efforts made during 
influence of this period to naturalise Shakespeare. The 
sMi-cspeare. j- wo names m0 st prominently connected 
with this endeavour — but by no means the only 
ones — are those of Letourneur (1736-1788) and 
Ducis (1733-1816). 

Even before the middle of the century, attempts had 

been made in this direction. Voltaire, bitter as the 

thought must have been to him in after 

Letourneur. 

years, had led the way. 1 Prevost followed 
suit (1738). Their work, however, was mainly critical 
or appreciative. And it was only by translation that 
first-hand knowledge could be given. This was sup- 
plied in 1745, when two volumes of translation, shortly 
to be followed by two more, were published by La Place, 
an analysis of certain plays not included in the trans- 
lation being added, after the fashion set by Prevost. 
Certainly the version of La Place left much to be 
desired, as well in accuracy as completeness; and it 
was to make good these deficiencies that Letourneur, 
aided by two others, took the field (1776). Their 
translation threw all previous efforts into the shade. 
It was strikingly faithful, it was complete, and it 
was patronised by most of the notables of Europe. 

1 Lettres Philosophiques, 1733-34. 



362 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Among the subscribers were the kings of France and 
England ; a present, past, and future Prime Minister 
of France (Turgot, Choiseul, Necker); the greatest 
actor of the age ; two of its most prominent philos- 
ophers (Holbach and Diderot) ; x finally — and this was 
the unkindest cut of all — D'Argental, the "guardian 
angel" of Voltaire, and the Empress Catherine, the 
supreme goddess of his idolatry. What wonder that 
Voltaire was stung to a frenzy of righteous indigna- 
tion? He was wounded in his literary religion no 
less than in his vanity ; he was wounded in the very 
house of his friend. The old warrior at once sprang 
to arms and prepared a manifesto which was designed 
to cover "that clown Shakespeare and that merry - 
andrew Letourneur " with ridicule and contempt. The 
letter was read by d'Alembert, on whose lips it lost 
nothing of its force, before a public meeting of the 
Academy (August 25, 1776). 2 For the moment, the 
triumph of " the good cause " was complete ; the fire 
and wit of the Patriarch carried all before them. An 
English boy, unabashed by the general merriment, was 
heard calling for a hooter " to hiss that Voltaire " ; 3 

1 Compare Diderot's letter to Tronchin, Dec. 18, 1776: " Ce 
Shakespeare etait un terrible mortel ; ce n'est pas le gladiateur an- 
tique, ni l'Apollon du Belvidere ; mais c'est Pinforme et grossier 
Colosse de Notre-Dame ; Colosse Gothique, mais entre les jambes 
duquel nous passerions tous." Quoted by M. Jusserand, from whose 
Shakespeare en France I have drawn freely throughout this para- 
graph and the next. 

2 See Voltaire, Correspondance Generate, t. xii. ; Correspondance de 
d'Alembert, t. ii. : Letters of July 19, 30 ; Aug. 15, 27 ; Oct. 15, 1776. 
For his Letter to the Academy, (Euvres, t. xlix., pp. 309-334. 

3 La Harpe, Corr. Litt., i. 419. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 363 

but Mrs Montague, who was there to grace the tri- 
umph of the enemy, was forced to submit in silence. 
Yet to the end Voltaire was haunted by a fear that 
the foe would rally his forces ; and his alarms were 
not without foundation. The list of subscribers to the 
" abomination of desolation " increased with each suc- 
cessive volume ; it was swelled by the names of several 
among Voltaire's personal friends. Even some of the 
Academicians — for instance Suard, Mercier, and Sed- 
aine — went over to the " drunken savage." It would 
appear that France as a whole still wavered in the 
balance. The worst, however, was yet to come. When 
Voltaire died two years later, the choice of the Aca- 
demy fell on Ducis for his successor. The high-priest 
of Eacine was replaced by the most ardent of the 
worshippers of Shakespeare. The scene at the recep- 
tion of the new member must have been deeply 
mortifying to the faithful d'Alembert. Ducis adroitly 
threw stress upon the romantic innovations of his 
mercurial predecessor. The obscure Abbe, who was 
put up to answer him, prudently forgot to mention 
the unrecanted heresies of the neophyte; and, after 
some aimless babble about the comparatively classical 
and innocent CEdipe (1778), launched into an attack 
on the irreligion of Voltaire. For the causes which 
the departed patriarch had at heart it was a decisive 
check. The honours of the sitting remained with the 
courteous but impenitent Ducis. 

The long life of Ducis was consumed in the attempt 
to make Shakespeare — the "god of the drama," as 
Letourneur called him — at home on the French stage. 



364 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

One after another all the tragedies of the arch- 
romanticist were adapted with this object, 

Duels. 

and an incursion was even made into the 
Histories. The dates are as follows : Hamlet, 1769 ; 
Borneo, 1772; Lear, 1783; Macbeth, 1784; Othello, 
1792 ; Jean Sans - Terre (ou La Mort d* Arthur), 
1791. After 1792 the author held his hand, on 
the sufficient ground that tragedies enough were 
being enacted at his door. But he was busy in 
retouching, altering, recasting almost to the end 
of his days. The fruit of these long labours is a 
strange hybrid, but one in which the romantic inset 
prevails over the classical stock on which it is so 
ingeniously grafted. The worst defects of the classical 
model doubtless remain untouched. The bulk of the 
action is transacted behind the scene ; the poetic 
diction, the avoidance of the "mot propre," is not 
seldom grotesque; the speeches are rather declam- 
atory than dramatic ; the characters are on stilts. The 
unity of time, it may be added, though not that of 
place, is sedulously observed. On the other hand, the 
appeal to sentiment — or, as the author calls it, to the 
" feelings of pity and terror," in particular the terrors 
of the supernatural and the sense of horror — is re- 
morselessly worked ; so remorselessly that, in more 
than one case, the audience rose in revolt, and could 
only be appeased by the substitution of a happy end- 
ing, which Ducis, even without such pressure, was not 
unwilling to supply. "Allow me/' seems to have 
been his argument, "to draw as many tears and 
shudders as /please during nine-tenths of my piece, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 365 

and I will give as many smiles as you please at the 
close." Thus, in Romeo and Juliet, Montague, a second 
Ugolino, being imprisoned by Capulet, has devoured 
all his children except Eomeo. But, to redress the 
balance, Juliet awakes from her trance at the right 
moment, and the play ends in sunshine and orange- 
blossoms. Like changes were made at the end of 
Hamlet, Lear, and Othello. It was only by such con- 
cessions that Shakespeare could be made palatable to 
a French audience. Thanks to them, all these plays, 
Macbeth excepted, seem to . have been received with 
great applause. They were performed under Napo- 
leon, who had always a weakness for the high-flown, 
in himself and others. They remained in the reper- 
tory of the French stage until the high tide of romance 
had begun to ebb. 

One dramatist alone remains to mention, and he is 
among the strangest figures in the history of litera- 
comedy: ture. This is Beaumarphais (1732-1799), 

Beaumarchais. w h ose WO rks stand entirely apart from 
the general tendencies of his time. Three of his 
plays, indeed, as we have seen, belong to the order 
of " sombre " or " serious " drama. But they are 
an unhappy concession to the fashion of the day, 
and in no way represent the vital qualities of his 
genius. The real man is to be sought in his two 
comedies, Le Barbier de Simile (1775) and, far more, 
in Le Mariage de Figaro (1784). The scene of both 
is laid in Spain; their outward machinery to some 
extent drawn from the drama of Spain. But in 
the later one, at any rate, the eye of the author is 



366 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

fixed upon France, and the spirit of the comedy is 
essentially French. Figaro is the most sparkling, but 
bitterest, satire of French society, as it was on the 
eve of the Eevolution. And it must be confessed that 
the purely dramatic ends of the piece are at least 
once, in the famous soliloquy of the hero, sacrificed to 
the overmastering fury of the satirist. But the blows 
are so well planted, they reach so far beyond the mere 
abuses of the moment, that it is hard to regret this ; 
and throughout the rest of the play the dramatic 
proprieties are maintained with a skill and force be- 
yond reach of cavil. It has been objected that the 
whole comedy, in particular the last act, is too much 
a game of hide-and-seek. This is only to say that it 
is — doubtless, in rather an extreme form — a comedy 
of intrigue. And the incidents are in themselves so 
amusing, they are so ingeniously contrived to bring 
out the conflicting characters of the agents, that 
the criticism falls to the ground. It cannot, indeed, 
be maintained that Beaumarchais gave an entirely 
new turn to the Comedy of his age, such as Moliere 
had given to that of France, and the Eestoration 
dramatists to that of England, in the preceding cen- 
tury. But it may safely be asserted that, with the 
reservation already indicated, he returned to the best 
traditions of his great predecessor. In his invincible 
valet he created a type as true to nature as it is 
dramatically effective. And in Cherubin, without 
overstepping the appropriate bounds of Comedy, he 
touched a deep spring of pathos and poetry. The 
glorious melodies of Mozart merely bring to the sur- 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 367 

face what from the first was latent in the creation of 
Beaumarchais. And all this is the very soul of 
romance. 

The Eevolution was singularly barren in dramatic 
as in other kinds of literary talent ; and the Empire, 
Fabre with its " decennial prizes " and its leaden 

d'Egiantine. censorship, was infinitely worse. Under 
the former head we may content ourselves with 
pointing to the work of Fabre d'Egiantine (1750- 
1794) and of Joseph Chenier, the younger brother 
of Andre (1764-1811). Of the former little is to 
be said. His one title to fame is Philinte (1790), 
which he had the temerity to conceive and announce 
as a continuation of Le Misanthrope. Naturally no 
play could stand the comparison thus challenged, 
and the author put himself further in the wrong 
by entirely distorting the character of his hero. 
The main theme of the play is as serious as that 
of Moliere's masterpiece, and it lacks the relief 
given by the satire of the marquises and the high 
comedy of Arsinoe and Celimene. For all that, it 
is a striking performance ; and in its seriousness, 
as well as in its obligations to Eousseau, it carries 
on the romantic strain which we have noticed in the 
earlier part of the period. Fabre, it may be recorded, 
was joint-author of the Eevolutionary Calendar, and 
was executed on the same day as Danton. There 
is a tradition that, on his arrest, a play, directed 
against Eobespierre and the Jacobins, was seized and 
destroyed. 

The work of Chenier, in spite of its obvious 



368 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

defects, is of greater importance. More than any 
Tragedy: other writer, he represents the passions, 
m. j. cumtor. we ma y even sa y ^ e aspirations, of the 

revolutionary era. Author of the spirited Chant du 
Depart (1794), which is second only to the Mar- 
seillaise of Eouget de Lisle (1792), he was the 
official poet of the Convention at the Feast of the 
Supreme Being and other revolutionary celebrations. 
But his main strength was thrown into the drama. 
And here, on literary as well as historical grounds, 
he deserves more recognition than he has commonly 
received. "A pupil of Voltaire, and none of the 
best," he has been called; but the phrase barely 
does him justice. In Henry VIII. (1791) and 
TimoUon, a classical tragedy with a chorus (1795), 
he certainly falls immeasurably below his model. 
And the construction of his plays is generally weak. 
But it may be doubted whether Voltaire ever wrote 
anything so stirring as single scenes to be found in 
his earlier dramas : the " scene of the harangues " in 
Caius Gracchus (1792), and the blessing of the swords 
by the Cardinal of Lorraine in Charles IX. (1788 ; 
first performed November 1789). The latter, in par- 
ticular, is not only supremely effective as melodrama ; 
it is declamation of a very high order. No wonder 
that the audience of 1789 was wrought by it to a 
frenzy of excitement. 1 In two of his plays, Galas 
(1790) and Finilon (1793), Ch&iier strikes into 
domestic tragedy after the fashion of Mdanie. The 

1 There is a lively description of an early performance (Jan. 1790) 
in Baggesen's Labyrinthen Vcerker, t. xi., pp. 58, 59. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 369 

imitation is no better, nor perhaps is it much worse, 
than the model. But the choice of subject, particu- 
larly in the case of Calas, is significant. Altogether 
it must be admitted that the classicism of Ch^nier 
is tempered, to a degree more than ordinary, by cross 
currents of romance. He translated Gray's Elegy, it 
is true with a certain coyness of the Englishman's 
romantic detail — the " beetle's droning flight," for in- 
stance, vanishes ; and on occasion he speaks of Shake- 
speare with an enthusiasm which would have enraged 
Voltaire, and must almost have satisfied Ducis. Of 
romanticism in his own contemporaries, Chateau- 
briand and Madame de Stael, he was less tolerant. 

Much the same tradition, but with an added touch 
of emphasis, was carried forward under the Consulate 
Lemercier: and Empire. Of this period the one rep- 
Tmgedy. resentative worth mentioning is Lemercier 
(1771-1840); and it says much that, though his 
best tragedies belong to the years immediately be- 
fore and after 1800, not one of them was per- 
formed until the fall of Napoleon and of the 
rigid censorship which he plumed himself on main- 
taining. After making his bow to the public in a 
purely classical tragedy (Agamemnon, 1797), Lemercier 
plunged boldly into romance. The scene of Ophis 
(1799) is laid in Egypt, and it is clearly written 
under the strongest possible influence of Sdmiramis. 
A large part of the play is performed in the royal 
vault ; but the disciple betters the instruction of the 
master by raising the dead to life; while the king, 
thus restored to power, concludes the piece, like a 

2 A 



370 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

good citizen of the Directory, by resigning a "vain 
crown" and seeking happiness in obscurity. The 
only other tragedy which calls for recognition is 
Charlemagne (written 1800-1, first performed 1816), 
and that, perhaps, more from incidental circum- 
stances than from the intrinsic merits of the piece. 
There is one scene which is manifestly inspired by 
the pleading of Arthur with Hubert in King John — 
an inspiration which the writer again sought in 
Richard III et Jane Shore (1824). It is said, more- 
over, that Napoleon prohibited the play on the 
ground that, instead of relating a conspiracy against 
the life of his "predecessor Charlemagne," it ought 
to end with his coronation. But it is only fair to 
record that Lemercier himself gives a different account 
of the matter. " I was ordered," he writes, " to stage 
it as it how stands ; but I refused to obey, having 
no wish that literature should aid the designs of 
policy at the moment when the Consulate was about 
to exalt itself into an hereditary empire. This 
sacrifice," he continues, "lost me the advantage of 
being the first to reopen the choice of national 
subjects, among which I was already prepared to 
place Clovis and Saint Louis." To these were sub- 
sequently added Frtdtgonde and Charles VI, not 
to mention Les Martyrs de Sotdi, a drama on the 
insurrection of Greece, which appeared towards the 
end of his career (1825), and belongs to the general 
movement that culminated in les Orientates of 
Hugo. 

The same romantic leaning, though in a very 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 371 

different manner, appears in his one comedy, Pinto 
(1800). Here again an historical incident, 

His comedy. 

the revolt of Portugal from Spam, forms 
the theme of the dramatist. But, with an instinct 
that might be paralleled from the later history of 
Eomance, the nobler side of the enterprise is kept 
deliberately in the background, the interest being 
ingeniously centred in the personal motives and in- 
trigues which, it is said, are commonly interwoven 
with a revolution, and which, in Lemercier's hands, 
give rise to some excellent comedy, recalling, if 
somewhat faintly, the quips and agility of Figaro. 
Nor, though its connection with the Drama is some- 
what nominal, must La Panhypocrisiade (1819) be for- 
gotten. It is a scathing satire — Comtdie tfpique is the 
description on the title-page — against the hypocrisy 
with which the world is governed. Charles V. 
and Luther, the papal court and Francis L, are all 
brought beneath the poet's lash. In the scope of 
the satire and its scene, which is cast in the lower 
regions, as well as in the bold mingling of drama 
and narrative, it is hard not to see an anticipation 
of the later work of Hugo. But, with all his varied 
energies, the main field of Lemercier was tragedy. 
And here the words above quoted mark his abiding 
place as the precursor of French Eomance. With 
Joseph Chenier he must share the credit of reviving 
the historical drama, which played so large a part 
in the ferment of 1830 ; and he is less hampered 
than Chenier by the classical tradition. It was not 
altogether inappropriate that his successor, as member 



372 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

of the Academy, should be no other than the arch- 
heretic Hugo. 

This concludes our account of the French Drama. 
The determining factor in its history is the spirit 
of seriousness which had come over the "gay 
nation." The first result of this was that, with one 
single and brilliant exception, comedy had for the 
moment almost ceased to count. The second, that 
tragedy had to a large extent given way to the 
"serious drama"; while it was further modified by 
the introduction of romantic themes and incidents, 
of which Voltaire in his later plays had set the 
fashion, but which was now extended, with none 
of Voltaire's reserves, under the very different in- 
spiration of Shakespeare. A certain return towards 
classicism is observable in Chenier, as it is in all 
the products of the revolutionary ferment; but even 
he has many of the characteristics of romance. 

The same story is repeated in the poetry of the 
epoch, and in language no less emphatic. In no 

Descriptive country does descriptive poetry play so 

poetry. large a part during this period as in 
France ; and the descriptions, it need hardly be 
said, go back in the last resort to Thomson for 
their inspiration. It should be added, however, 
that the influence of Germany — in this instance, 
of Gessner and Haller — blends itself with that of 
England ; and, what is yet more important, that 
descriptive poetry is universally assumed to go 
hand in hand with didactic. Thus the way is 
opened for yet another stream of influence — that of 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 373 

the English moralists, and, in particular, of Young. 
And it is this predominance of the moral note 
which gives its distinctive tone to the descriptive 
poetry of France, as compared with that of Germany 
or England. In the latter countries the two kinds 
of poetry are, in some measure, held apart. In 
France they are uniformly blended, and the moralist 
commonly has the upper hand of the painter. 

The influence of Thomson first openly declared 
itself in 1759, the date of a translation of the 
Foreign Seasons by Madame Bontemps. But it 
influences. mu st have begun to work some years 
earlier; for Saint-Lambert's poem, though not pub- 
lished till the end of the next decade, is known 
to have been on the stocks some "fifteen or twenty 
years before." Ossian became known in France 
almost immediately on the appearance of Macpher- 
son's adaptation (1760-63). 1 But no French version 
was issued until that of Letourneur (1777), 2 who 
also translated the Night Thoughts of Young (1769), 
two significant additions to the heresies which must 
be laid at the door of the worshipper of Shake- 
speare. One other translation may here be men- 
tioned, more because it betokens a general revolu- 
tion of literary taste than from any direct bearing 

1 A few fragments from Macpherson's first volume were translated 
by Turgot (CEuvres, ix. 141-151), apparently soon after their appear- 
ance (1760). But I am unable to find the exact date. It may be 
mentioned that Turgot also translated pieces of Gessner and 
Klopstock. 

2 A later translation, in verse, is by Baour-Lormian (1801). Adap- 
tations in verse will also be found in the poems of Joseph Chenier. 



374 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

on our subject. This is the version of the Inferno 
by Eivarol (1785), which followed a Life of Dante, 
with a detailed account of his works, by Chabanon 
(1773), 1 Considering the alternate irony and con- 
tempt which Voltaire launched at the great Italian, 
and which it is to be feared that Goethe would have 
been ready to echo, it is manifest that these things 
have their significance. They mark the beginnings 
of that great reversal of literary opinion, of which 
the abiding monument is Be VAllemagne of Madame 
de Stael. 

These influences, notably that of Thomson, were not 
long in making themselves felt. From 1760 onwards 
we have an uninterrupted stream of descrip- 
tive poems, some of them betraying further 
the prompting of Young, Gray, and other English dis- 
ciples of the school of melancholy. Of these, perhaps 
the most important are Les quatre Saisons, ou Les 
Georgiques frangaises of Bernis (1763), Les quatres 
Parties du Jour by the same author (1769), Le 
Matin et le Soir (1764) and Les Saisons (1768) by 
Saint - Lambert ; finally, the long list of poems by 
Delille, beginning with his translation of the Georgics 
(1769) and stretching on through half the Consulate 
and Empire. We may confine ourselves to the work 
of Saint-Lambert and Delille. 

Saint-Lambert (1716-1803), who frankly admits his 
debt to Germany and England, announces his inten- 
tion of giving " pictures rather than descriptions." 

1 The welcome which Grimm gave to both is very noticeable. 
Corr. Litt., ix. 22; xiv. 293. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 375 

This laudable desire is unfortunately by no means 
fulfilled. Throughout, when not moralising 

Saint-Lambert. . 

— and he explicitly asserts that a trench 
poet, writing for a public " to which nature is either 
unknown or indifferent, ,, is bound to moralise — he 
works in the purest vein of description. Sheep-shear- 
ing, fishing, shooting, the hunt, the vintage, even the 
joys of the stage and of private reading, all come in for 
their turn. And though now and again a really fine 
line — for instance, that which describes the rocks swept 
down by the swollen river in L'Automne — is thrown 
in, it must be confessed that the general effect is 
monotonous; and that, neither in fidelity of detail 
nor in freshness of spirit, is the scholar comparable 
to his English tutor. In one respect, however, the 
positions are reversed. Birds may be "le peuple 
aile des bois," the " plumy people " of Thomson ; and 
the signs of the sky may be " les promesses d'£ole." 
But, on the whole, there is far less of this " glossy, 
unfeeling diction " in the disciple than the master ; 
and this must be counted to him for righteousness. 
It is rather curious that, after casting some scorn in 
his preface on the sentimental episodes of Thomson — 
those episodes which Wordsworth declared to have 
made the fortune of the Seasons — Saint - Lambert 
should sprinkle his pages with stories precisely of 
the same type, but yet more heavily loaded with 
sentiment. It may be added that the Tales and 
Fables appended to Les Saisons betray, like them, 
the sentiment and the romantic leanings of the 
author. The former go to the Bed Indians and 



376 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Jamaica for their scenery \ the latter turn to the 
East, and are, in some cases, based on those of 
Sadi. 

Delille (1738-1813) in his own day passed for a great 

poet. No one would make that claim for him at the 

present time. But he remains the most 

DdUle. 

representative poet or the last years ot the 
old order, and, in many ways, of the Directory and the 
Empire. His chief works are Les Jardins (1782), Les 
trois Begnes (animal, vegetable, and mineral), V Homme 
des Champs (1800), Le Malheur et la PitU (1803), and 
L y Imagination (1806). Besides these, he made trans- 
lations, or what by courtesy may be called such, of 
the Georgics (1769), the JEneid (1804), the Eclogues 
(1806), and Paradise Lost (1805). His original works 
have the ordinary merits and defects of their class, 
and he avowedly follows Saint- Lambert in marry- 
ing the descriptive to the didactic. His distinguishing 
mark is the extreme— not to say fatal — smoothness 
of his versification, which caused Grimm to pronounce 
him, and probably with justice, the most harmonious 
of all poets since Eacine ; though he maliciously barbed 
the compliment by applying to his music the not 
altogether flattering term ramage. And it is not 
surprising to find that this smoothness of flow goes 
hand in hand with an equal "glossiness" of diction, 
a constant effort — loudly proclaimed in theory, habit- 
ually maintained in practice — to " embellish with 
poetic colours the objects of nature, the methods of 
the various arts," — the sportsman's gun becomes "le 
tube, image du tonnerre," — " the precepts of morality 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 377 

and the sweet labours of country life." With this 
difference, Delille covers much the same ground as 
his predecessor, Saint -Lambert. Fishing, the hunt, 
the storm, the shooting - party, the very joys of 
manuring, do duty for the twentieth time ; while 
"le lotto du grand oncle, et le wisk des grands- 
peres" and other social distractions play a larger 
part with the diminutive abbe, who was nothing 
if not a ladies' man, than with the soldier who 
successfully disputed the loves both of Voltaire and 
Eousseau. Like Saint-Lambert, again, he intersperses 
his descriptions with sentimental episodes, 1 and, like 
him, he draws largely upon the English poets, par- 
ticularly Goldsmith. 2 On the other hand, and this 
applies especially to his later years, he is apt to 
go more widely afield in search of colours for his 
pallet; as Chateaubriand sarcastically remarks, "He 
naturalised my wild flowers in his various French 
gardens, and set himself to cool my fiery wine in 
the cold water of his transparent spring." 3 From 
the gardens, French or exotic, it is a relief to turn 
to the one poem in which Delille consented to speak 
from his heart. This is Le Malheur et la Pitie — an 
assault on the excesses of the Eevolution, and, in 
particular, on the harsh treatment of the emigrants 
and clergy. It is possible to disagree with every 
word of this lamentation, and yet to feel that the 

1 The whole of one book of V Imagination is taken up with a story 
based on the wreck of the Antelope. 

2 See V Homme des Champs, Book I., which contains a rather bare- 
faced adaptation of Goldsmith's Schoolmaster and Parson. 

3 Chateaubriand, Memoires, ii. 138. 



378 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

author has here opened a far purer source of poetry 
than when he was cataloguing all the royal pleas- 
aunces from China to Peru, from the gardens of 
Alcinous to those of Eheinsberg, Wilhelmshohe, and 
Park Place. 

With the descriptive poets, though in a place apart, 

we may mention Fontanes (1757-1821), the other 

representative poet of the Empire and, 

Fontanes. . . . 

with many reserves, its omcial mouthpiece 
in things literary and intellectual. In a moment 
of weakness, Sainte-Beuve hailed this writer as the 
herald of the new era, but he subsequently repented, 
and dethroned the idol he had set up. There can 
be no doubt that the later estimate is the true one. 
From the descriptive poets, as has been said, he 
stands somewhat apart. In a certain sense, he is 
in advance of them. He has more feeling ; he has 
deeper reflection; he has a truer sense of what 
poetry can accomplish. 1 But the form of his poetry 
and, in later years, its habitual subjects also seem to 
take us backward rather than forward. It is marred 
by an excess of reserve and self-restraint ; it is too 
deliberately classical in its intention ; it lacks the 
fire, the movement, and the colour of inspiration. In 
all these respects, even Delille, in his better moments, 
has a truer claim to the title of precursor than 
Fontanes. Neither of them enters into the reckoning 
with Andre Chenier. As a critic, however, he de- 
serves our gratitude. In spite of his classical leanings 

1 His best pieces are probably Le Jour des Morts and La Chartreuse 
de Paris ; both are early works. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 379 

he was among the first to recognise the greatness of 
Chateaubriand, of whose " barbarism he was a pas- 
sionate admirer, and whose language he understood, 
though he could not speak it." Both Le Gtnie du 
Christianisme and Atala owed much to his advice. 
It was he, for instance, who insisted that the discourse 
of the Pere Aubry must be entirely recast. 1 

One poet still remains : Parny (1753 - 1814), the 

author of glowing love-poems to " Eleanore," and of 

La Guerre des Dieitx. It is by the former 

Parny. 

that he takes place in the romantic re- 
vival; the latter, a highly irreverent but extremely 
clever satire on Christianity and all its works, is of 
the purest eighteenth century. The love poems 
strike a new vein, both in their spirit and their 
setting. Written in the tropics, they have some- 
thing of the glow of the tropical sky, the heat and 
passion of the tropical temperament. They do not 
pretend to aim high ; but what they do attempt, 
they perform with an easy mastery which more 
serious writers might pardonably envy. During the 
ten years or so which preceded the Eevolution they 
were, as Chateaubriand says, on everybody's lips; 
and that was due not merely to the subject, but to 
the halo of romantic novelty which he cast around 
it. 2 These were the main achievements of the author. 

1 Chateaubriand, Memoires, ii. 123, 124 ; 189. 

2 In this connection, it is right to mention Bertin (1752-1790). 
Like Parny, he was a native of the tropics, and his poetry has much 
of the same tropical glow. On the whole, it is probably inferior to 
that of Parny ; but in one piece (El. III. ii.) he may be thought to 
rise even higher. His Elegies were published in 1780. 



380 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT, 

In his more frivolous poems he is, from the nature 
of the case, nothing more than an easy versifier. In 
his burlesque Guerre des Dieux anciens et modernes 
(1799), quite apart from the offence which the choice 
of such a subject was bound to give, he is certainly 
unequal. Yet it must be admitted that the satire 
not seldom strikes home ; and, as condensing the 
intellectual atmosphere of the later phases of the 
Eevolution, it has an importance which has been 
unduly overlooked. Much of his later poetry — for 
instance, Les Rosecroix (1807), a violently romantic 
epic on the times of Saint Dunstan, in which invading 
Danes play the part that ought, by rights, to have 
been played by invading French — is incredibly bad. 

We turn to the group of writers who, in an excep- 
tional degree, represent the influence of Rousseau. 

influence of That influence, it need hardly be said, was 

Rousseau, ^y f ar ^he most fruitful at work during 
the whole of this period ; and, in the larger sense, 
it may be said to have leavened the whole mass of 
which we have treated. But, in a more special 
sense, it inspired a band of writers who were proud 
to claim Eousseau as their master, and some of 
whom lived in constant intercourse with him, after 
his return to Paris in 1770. Of these the most 
marked are Florian (1755-1799), Mercier (1740- 
1814), and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814). 

The first of these forms a curious link between 
Voltaire and Eousseau, — nephew of the 

Florian. . 

one, disciple of the other. He wrote 
comedies, of a highly virtuous and sentimental char- 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 381 

acter; Fables (1792), which are obviously intended 
to embody the ideal of the Fable set forth in Eous- 
seau's Lettre it d'Ahmlert ; historical novels, one of 
them (Gonzalve de Cordoue) on the Fall of Granada ; 
but, above all, Pastorals, of which the best known is 
Estelle (1788). In substance, this is a mere replica 
of a literary form, already hopelessly out of date. 
Such merit as it has lies in the setting, which gives 
what is said to be a faithful and is certainly a pleasing 
picture of the country on the banks of the Gardon 
(Languedoc), where Florian himself was born and 
which he passionately loved. This is the original 
strain in his work, and it brings him into line with 
Eousseau, Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, and, among 
later writers, Lamartine and George Sand. It may be 
added that, besides Eousseau, he owes allegiance to 
Gessner and, in some of his Pastorals, to Cervantes 
and the lesser lights of Spain. 

Far more important is Mercier. 1 His work, as 
dramatist, has already been noticed in passing ; and 
Mercier— it is enough to add that, of all those who 
as critic. followed Diderot in advocacy of Le Drame, 
he was the most convinced and the most persistent. 
Yet it is not on his dramas, numerous and often 
interesting as they are, that his chief claim must 
be based. His creative instinct was comparatively 
weak; he was above all a man of marvellously 
keen sympathies, great powers of observation, and 
an exceptionally vigorous and inquiring mind. Apart 

1 Mercier has a link with English literature through his daughter, 
who married Holcroft. 



382 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

from his photographic record of contemporary man- 
ners, and the schemes of social reform which he 
built upon it, he has left us two " Poetics," which 
must be regarded as the most complete statement 
existing of the literary creed accepted by the more 
adventurous spirits of the fifteen or twenty years 
immediately preceding the Eevolution. These are 
Essai sur Vart dramatique (1773) and Be la Literature 
et des Litterateurs (1778). The latter, like the former, 
is mainly concerned with the Drama ; and it is by far 
the more searching and pointed of the two. What is 
it, he asks, that has made the drama of France so in- 
expressibly barren ? In the first place, he replies, it 
is merely the pastime of " two or three thousand 
idlers " among the rich ; it should be the intellectual 
recreation of the many. And when we consider what 
the French drama is, we shall cease to wonder that it 
leaves the nation entirely untouched. The tragic 
dramatists have prided themselves on copying the 
masterpieces of Greece. What more fatal mistake 
could possibly have been committed ? The model, at 
the best, is inappropriate ; how can a modern audience 
feel any living interest in the themes of two-and- 
twenty centuries ago ? And the copy of this moulder- 
ing antiquity has not even the merit of fidelity. It is 
Greece spoilt by French airs and graces ; a u hybrid," 
corresponding to nothing which ever did, or ever can, 
have existence in reality. The figures of French 
Tragedy are, in fact, mere "marionettes, moving 
through the intricacies of a plot deliberately entangled 
and, for that reason, infinitely false." The falseness 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 383 

of the matter is enhanced by that of the mechanism 
and the style ; by the " absurd " unities of time and 
place ; by the elaborate diction which, in itself, is 
enough to stifle the voice of nature. So long as we 
adhere to verse, it is hardly possible that these things 
can be altered. The only infallible remedy is to re- 
place verse by prose. " Imagine the prose of Eousseau 
on the French stage, and you will see how all these 
verses pale before it." But, behind the question of 
style lies the far deeper and graver one of matter. 
Modern life spreads before us, with all the revelations 
of science, with all the diversity of energies which 
new conditions have called out. " And we are blind 
enough to turn away from the living model, in which 
every muscle swells and stands out full of vitality 
and expression, in order to draw a Greek or Eoman 
carcase, to colour its livid cheeks, to set it on its 
tottering feet, and to give " to this automaton " the 
look, the idiom, and the gestures which are fashion- 
able on the boards of the Parisian stage." Far better 
would it be to follow in the steps of Moliere, of the 
Spanish dramatists, and above all of Shakespeare ; l to 
put life in place of death ; to fill our stage with the 
interests that concern us every day, with the men and 
women whom we jostle in the streets. 

1 In the latter part of the treatise (ed. 1778, pp. 136-143) is a 
passage which is obviously written in reply to the truculent attack 
of Voltaire (see above, p. 362). It may be mentioned that Mercier 
himself adapted three of the plays of his " favourite author" : King 
Lear t Timon of Athens, and Romeo and Juliet (Les Tombeaux de 
Verone). In Timon he adheres somewhat closely to his original ; 
not so in the others. 



384 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

No repudiation of the Classical Drama could be 

more complete. In all points, except glorification of 

the grotesque, it anticipates by half a cen- 

As dramatist. ox* x v 

tury the famous Preface of Cromwell. The 
pity is that, in his own plays, Mercier should have 
carried out so imperfectly the ideal he had before 
him; that he should have used the stage so persist- 
ently as a pulpit ; that, in his eagerness to point 
a moral, he should have forgotten in practice to 
give his characters the flesh and blood, the nerve 
and "muscle/' which his theory rightly declared to 
be the first condition of their existence. 1 For this, 
no doubt, the natural deficiencies of the author are 
largely to blame. But no inconsiderable allowance 
must be made for the influence of Diderot and 
Eousseau. 

Among Eousseau's disciples, Bernardin de Saint- 
Pierre stands out as the most intimate and, perhaps, 

the most original. 2 Like many other 

Saint-Pierre. . . it • 

writers of the time, he lives mainly by 
one book, Paul et Virginie (1788). The book is 
filled from end to end with Eousseau's ideas, and 
it has even a faint reflection of Eousseau's genius. 
The boy and girl round whom the story centres 
are true children of nature, the Smile and Sophie 
of a soil more bounteous than France. But no 

1 An exception should perhaps be made in favour of La Brouette 
du Vinaigrier (pub. 1775). And that is mainly saved by the effective 
symbolism of the last act. The wheelbarrow is the true hero of 
the piece. 

2 It is mainly from him and Mercier that we derive our knowledge 
of Rousseau as he was in the last years of his life. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 385 

sooner does civilisation — in the shape of a worldly 
aunt, a governor, and a priest— come on their horizon 
than the whole fabric of beauty crumbles to dust. 
The lovers are torn asunder, their happiness is 
destroyed, they do not meet again until Virginie is 
drowned before her lover's eyes — drowned rather than 
submit to be rescued by a naked sailor. With the 
last touch, which is intended to mark the sublime of 
virtuous sensibility, Rousseau, we may hope, would 
have had little sympathy. But all the rest is entirely 
in his vein. So also is the glowing picture of outward 
nature, the valleys and mountains of Mauritius. Here 
we come to the most original strain in the genius of 
the author. Eousseau had painted with unrivalled 
force the softer scenery of Savoy, the Jura, and the 
Lower Ehone. But neither he nor any other writer 
had yet attempted — none with the requisite talent had 
been in a position to attempt — the sharp contrasts and 
the unbounded richness of the tropics. Saint-Pierre 
did so ; and for that reason he forms the connecting 
link between Eousseau and Chateaubriand. Not that, 
as some have thought, he is to be compared strictly 
with either writer, though he approaches, no doubt, 
more closely to the latter. His method is more 
precise ; he wields his botanical terms with a mastery 
and effect of which there is small trace in Chateau- 
briand, and none at all in Eousseau. But, with all 
his vividness, he has not the genius which enabled 
the others to seize, not merely the outward aspect, 
but the very soul and spirit, of the scenes they call 
before us. 

2 B 



386 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

It is difficult to believe that this story, so fresh and 
so full of pathos, fell absolutely flat when it was read 
in manuscript to Madame Necker and a circle of her 
literary friends. One of the company went to sleep ; 
another — it was Buffon — stole away ; the hostess her- 
self pronounced it "a glass of iced water." When 
published, it was exalted to the skies, and its fame has 
never waxed entirely dim. The same can hardly be 
said of the author's remaining stories — La ChaumUre 
Indienne, Le Caf6 de Surate, and EArcadie. The last, 
which owes much to the counsels of Eousseau, remains 
a fragment. It is perhaps mainly remarkable for the 
influence which it obviously had on Les Martyrs of 
Chateaubriand. The two former are tales after the 
fashion of Voltaire, — of Voltaire acting, by a passing 
freak, as the mouthpiece of Eousseau. They are full 
of irony against the intolerance of the creeds ; and the 
irony is none the less effective because it is altogether 
free from bitterness. They are full also of the author's 
childlike faith in the state of nature. Under another 
form, this is again the theme of the one work which 
it remains to mention — Etudes de la Nature (1784), of 
which Paul et Virginie originally formed part. Here 
Saint-Pierre turns to that outward nature which has 
never, like man, suffered divorce from its creator. 
The book is an eloquent plea for the doctrine of 
final causes ; and, eloquence apart, it has all the de- 
fects which that doctrine, when expounded in detail, 
inevitably involves. The pious writer was unfor- 
tunately altogether without humour ; he is ready to 
see the designs of Providence — a Providence eager to 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 387 

cater for the social joys of man — in the very rind of 
the melon. 

We have now only to cast a rapid glance at the 
miscellaneous writers of the years preceding the 

Miscellaneous Eevolution, and of the Eevolution itself. 

writers. ^r e shall then pass to the three great 

figures which stand at the entrance of the new era 
and mark the dawn of the literature of modern 
France. 

The chief names of the pre -revolutionary period 
under this head are those of Eaynal, Buffon, and the 
author of Le jeune Anacharsis ; to these we may add 
Grimm and Madame d'fipinay. 

The one work of Eaynal (1713-1796) which calls for 
notice is the famous Histoire philosophique et politique 
. . . des deux Indes (1774). It is a bitter, 
and it must be confessed a too just, attack 
on the greed and cruelty of the European Companies 
and Governments; and the latter of these vices it 
attributes, again with much justice, to the influence 
of an "exclusive and imperious religion. 5 ' The one 
" establishment," in favour of which Eaynal inclines to 
make an exception, is that of the Jesuits in Paraguay. 
This somewhat flimsy compilation, which is said to be 
largely the work of Diderot and others, exercised a 
large influence on public opinion during the seed- 
time of the Eevolution, and the author was regarded 
as one of the staunchest champions of progress — a 
reputation which was hardly sustained when events 
put it to the proof. 

Far more substantial is the work of Buffon (1707- 



388 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

1788), his monumental Histoire Natwrdle (1749-1788). 
Both by date and subject this falls beyond 

Buffon. mi mi i 

our scope. The author, however, touches 
general literature not merely by the beauty of his 
own style, but by his attitude towards the literary 
questions of his day. This appears from two dis- 
courses delivered before the Academy, — the one 
on the occasion of his own reception (1753), the 
famous discourse on Style; the other more than 
a score of years later, on the death of De Belloy 
(1775). The leading idea of the former is con- 
tained in the sentence, " Style is nothing more 
than the order and movement which the writer 
puts into his thoughts," — a conception which is 
further defined by the following: "Nothing is more 
harmful to warmth of style than the desire to put 
striking touches at every point." At first sight this 
might seem to exclude everything but the logical 
sequence, which is certainly the basis of style, but 
which, as certainly, does not exhaust its conditions. 
And that, no doubt, was the tendency of Buffon ; as, 
in England perhaps more than in France, it was the 
tendency of the age in which he grew to manhood. 
Nor can the familiar definition which immediately 
follows, "Le style est Thomme meme," be brought 
against this interpretation. For a glance at the con- 
text, which is commonly ignored, will show that 
Buffon's intention here is to contrast the mere col- 
lection of facts with the character, "the order and 
the movement," which they receive at the hands of 
the good writer. The facts, he says in effect, are 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 389 

every man's property ; " they lie outside of the man ; 
the style is the man himself." * Yet, when we remem- 
ber that he speaks not only of the " order " but also of 
the movement of thought, and when we think of his 
own style, which is certainly not lacking in warmth 
or colour, we shall incline to place a more liberal 
interpretation on the passage than that which sug- 
gests itself at the first moment. The other discourse 
touches us more nearly. For in it Buffon boldly 
ranges himself on the side of literary innovation. 
Eecalling the new paths into which De Belloy had 
directed the Drama, and adroitly enlisting the great 
name of Voltaire, a reluctant witness, in the same 
cause, he launches into an almost savage attack on 
the spirit of Greek poetry, and on the absurdity of 
those moderns who " have made a servile compact for 
ever to copy the pictures presented by that age of 
barbarism." No wonder that heretics, like Mercier, 
hailed this outburst with delight; that they revelled 
as they watched " all the Greek faces of the Academy 
turn pale with horror and surprise." 2 

Of Le Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grice (begun 

1757, published 1788) by Barthelemy (1716 - 1793) 

little is to be said. It is a work of learn- 

Barthelemy. . . _ 

mg, couched in the form of a romance; 
an ancestor of the Charicles and Gallus, which were 
the terror of our school-days, and as crowded with 
references to the less read classical authors as they. 

1 There is a variant, Le style est de Vkomme meme, which brings out 
the sense still more clearly. 

2 Mercier, De la Litterature, p. 134. 



390 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

It relates, in four bulky quartos, the experience of 
a young Scythian who travels in Greece during the 
fourth century B.C., and who criticises the manners 
and customs of Athens and other cities with a keen 
eye to the latitude of Paris. It ends with the battle of 
Chseronea, which is recorded in the following laconic 
sentences: "The battle is lost. Philotas is dead. I 
have no friends left. Greece is no more. I return 
to Scythia." Apart from its learning, which is really 
surprising, the book had a large share in placing the 
classical ideal of liberty before the French nation, 
then on the eve of the Ee volution. And the good 
Abbe may claim credit for having done much to 
mould both the thought and speech of Saint -Just, 
Eobespierre, and Barere, not to mention his avowed 
godson, Anacharsis Clootz, " the orator of the human 
race." * 

Grimm (1723-1807) was one of the acutest ob- 
servers, and probably the soundest critic, of his 
day. He lives for us in the pages of his 

Grimm. f 

Correspondance LitUraire, which contains 
some papers by Eaynal, some (including the notable 
Paradox on Acting' 1 ) by Diderot, and not a few by 
Madame d'fipinay, who took the place of the editor 
in chief when he was off duty. The later years 
(from 1774 onwards) appear to have been under- 
taken, under Grimm's direction, by Meister of Zurich. 

1 Anacharsis presents a strange contrast with the sombre imagina- 
tion and vague mysticism of another work, inspired in part by an 
antiquity still more remote, in part by the hopes and aspirations of 
the Revolution ; Les Euines, by Volney (1791). 

2 Corr. Litt., vii. 281-292, 305-318. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 391 

The Correspondence was addressed to the Empress 
Catherine, the King of Poland, and various German 
princelings, and it forms a complete survey of the 
literary activities of France during nearly forty 
years (1753-1790). It opens with a notice of Le 
Dissipateur of Destouches, and closes with one of 
Burke's Reflections — "grande mortalis aevi spatium." 
The value of Grimm's criticism lies in its great de- 
tachment, and in the wide knowledge on which it 
rests. He starts with as few preconceived notions as 
it is possible for man to do, and honestly strives to 
let each work speak for itself before he pronounces 
judgment. Linked as he was with d'Alembert, he is 
entirely free from the narrowness which the neces- 
sities of war, together with no small touch of natural 
pedantry, had forced upon his friend. The philoso- 
phers, he admits, have their fixed dogmas, their com- 
monplaces of the pulpit, their point d'orgue, no less 
than the churchmen. 1 The literary heretics, Sedaine, 
Mercier, and the rest, are not to be laughed out of 
court because they offend the orthodox susceptibilities 
of Voltaire. As an instance of his fairness, we may 
point to his comments on Diderot's review of Saint- 
Lambert ; or, what is yet more significant, to the un- 
failing respect — it would hardly be too much to say 
admiration — with which he speaks of the "English 
iEschylus," Shakespeare. 2 It was this that called out 
the grateful recognition of Wordsworth, who, perhaps 
with justice, attributes the superiority of Grimm in 
this matter to " his German blood and German educa- 

1 Corr. Litt, vii. 249. 2 lb., ix. 316-323 ; xiii. 391. 



392 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tion." l The one thing which it is hard to forgive him 
— and it touches the man rather than the critic — is 
the fulsome flattery which he lavishes on the un- 
speakable Catherine. But that is a weakness which 
he shares with all the philosophers ; not to mention 
that, to him personally, she was an exceptionally good 
customer. 

Madame d']£pinay (1723-1783) was closely bound 
to Grimm during the last five - and - twenty years 
Madame of her life; she was also, for a time, no 
d'tipinay. j ess c i ose ly bound to Eousseau. The 
twofold influence is reflected in her work, and 
found a ready response in her character. With 
Grimm, if we may judge from her contributions 
to the Correspondence and from certain passages in 
her Mdmoires, she shares the coolness of head which 
made the fortune of the critic, though not the less 
amiable qualities which make him so distasteful as a 
man. To the strain of Eousseau belong the extreme 
" sensibility " which she had from nature, and the fine 
discernment which is seldom or never to be found 
apart from sympathy. It is these qualities that give 
salt to her Mdmoires, a kind of writing in which the 
French genius has always shone, and to which she 
gave a fresh turn by adopting the form of a romance. 
Her Memoirs are probably the best of the period just 
preceding the Eevolution. They give a vivid picture 
of the society, noble, financial, and literary, of the 
third quarter of the century, and, in particular, 
they offer a side of Eousseau's character and genius 

1 Essay supplementary to the Preface of Lyrical Ballads (1815). 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 393 

which, but for them, it would have been difficult 
to divine. 1 

Side by side with the Memoirs of Madame d'fipinay 
we may place, passing now to the revolutionary 

Madame period, those of Madame Eoland (1753- 

Roiand. 1793). the latter the typical product of 
the new order, as the former of the old. Nothing 
could mark more clearly how complete was the 
breach which France had made with her own past 
than the contrast between the two. In the one 
we breathe the scented atmosphere of the salon; in 
the other, the free air of the market-place and the 
assembly. In the one, there is that curious blending of 
" philosophy " with the triumphs of the drawing-room 
which marked the last phase of the old order ; in the 
other, the consuming passion for the public weal which 
inspired the Eevolution. It is needless to say much 
of Memoirs so familiar. Enough to recall the vivid 
picture of bourgeois life at the beginning, and the 
touching simplicity of the writer's farewell to her 
child and the nurse who was left to guard it, of her 
references to her husband, of her parting from " one I 
dare not name," at the close. 

With Madame Eoland it is natural to associate 
one of the three other writers who fall to be men- 
tioned in this place — Condorcet (1743- 

Condorcet. . 

1794). Of his numerous writings, many 
of which are on mathematical and kindred subjects, 
three only survive for the general reader — his Lives 
of Turgot and Voltaire, and his Tableau des Progr&s 

1 See especially t. ii., pp. 61-72. 



394 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

de VEsprit humain. The last alone calls for notice. 
It has been lavishly praised by Comte and his 
disciples, on the ground that it contains the earliest 
clear statement of the creed of progress. It may be 
doubted, however, whether such praise is entirely de- 
served. The progress of which it is important to be 
assured is progress in things moral, social, and, we 
may fairly add, philosophical. Now of progress in these 
matters Condorcet says comparatively little ; and what 
he does say is largely vitiated by the narrow views 
of Christianity, political philosophy, and metaphysics, 
which he shared with the rest of his school, notably 
Voltaire, by whom it is clear that he was deeply in- 
fluenced. He is mainly concerned with progress in 
the sciences and technical arts, — in subjects, that is, 
where it has never been seriously disputed. And in 
these subjects he adds little to what had already been 
said in Voltaire's Essai sur les Mceurs. Altogether, it 
would be hazardous to maintain that his "sketch" 
marks an important stage in the development of 
that belief in progress which was among the most 
fruitful achievements of the generation that followed. 
It cannot, indeed, be reckoned as significant in this 
respect as the Essay of Kant, which preceded it 
by ten years. 1 Yet, when all deductions have been 
made, the Tableau is a striking monument to the 
faith which inspired the vast sacrifices of the Eevo- 
lution ; still more, perhaps, to the heroism of the 
man who wrote it with the sentence of outlawry 
upon his head, in the full knowledge that the next 

1 See above, p. 347. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 395 

moment might drag him from his hiding-place to 
the scaffold. 

It is, however, neither in Memoirs nor in Philosophy 

that the Eevolution leaves its most distinctive mark. 

The true vocation of the period is to be 

Journalism. ,.. ,. m-n 

found m journalism and eloquence. Till 
the approach of the Eevolution, the periodical press 
of France had been limited to literary criticism; 
the news reported was of the scantiest ; the political 
leading article was virtually unknown. Eloquence, 
again, was confined to the pulpit and the law courts. 
Oratory as we understand it, the oratory of the 
tribune and the platform, was the birth of the 
Eevolution, which, indeed, without the journalists 
and orators, would have been impossible. 

Even to run through the names of the chief journal- 
ists and pamphleteers of the Eevolution would be a 
task far beyond our limits. It is enough 
to take out two typical figures — the Abbe 
Sieyes (1748-1836) and Canaille Desmoulins (1760- 
1794). The former is best known by his pamphlet, 
Qu'est ce que le Tiers Mat (1788), a masterpiece of bold 
thought and trenchant exposition, which contained the 
" principles of '89 " in far more than germ. Through- 
out the Eevolution, Sieyes was regarded as holding the 
" key to all the Constitutions " ; and at length, after 18 
Brumaire, which he had conspired to bring about, he 
was induced to table the fruits of his meditations, 
ripened by an experience unrivalled in the history of 
the world. The result was the first draft of the Con- 
stitution of the year viii ; an elaborate mechanism of 



396 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

checks and counterchecks at which even the " genius 
of the English Constitution," if it survived the death 
of Burke, might have stood aghast. The draft, how- 
ever, was altered beyond recognition by a master-hand. 
" Sieyes," said Napoleon, " had supplied nothing but 
shadows ; on my word, I have put some substance." 

A man who, with all his faults, commands more 

sympathy is Desmoulins. Hero of the insurrection 

which secured the fall of the Bastille and 

Desmoulins. ■ ■■"«■« i • i 

the humiliation or the king, he remained 
a fighter to the last, bringing to the service of the 
Revolution all the wit, and unhappily all the reck- 
lessness, which we are apt to associate with the 
French genius in politics. His chief writings are La 
France Libre and Le Discours de la Lanterne (both in 
1789), Brissot Dtniasqud (1792), and two periodicals, 
Les Revolutions de France et de Brabant (November 
1789 — July 1791) and Le Vieux Cordelier (December 
1793 — March 1794). The earlier pieces, which are 
not lacking in political sense, are sprinkled on 
every page with personal accusations, and that at a 
time when accusation led straight to the lamp-post 
or the scaffold. The discredit of the Girondins 
was, in the first instance, largely due to his assaults. 
But when sentence was passed, a cry of remorse 
was wrung from the horrified accuser. From that 
moment he did all that was in his power to stay 
the flow of blood. And Le Vieux Cordelier stands as 
the monument of his repentance and his courage. In 
one number, while professing to contrast the cruelties 
of despotism with the tender mercies of the Republic, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 397 

he in reality launches a scathing satire against the 
latter. In another, he throws away even this thin 
disguise and calls aloud for a " Committee of Mercy." 
" Terror," he says, appealing to Cicero, as before to 
Tacitus and Suetonius, " is the mentor only of a day." 
This drew on him the resentment of the Committee 
which was not of Mercy, and he perished side by side 
with Danton (April 6, 1794). 

The orators of the Revolution are yet more not- 
able than its journalists. And here again we must 
content ourselves with the greatest, the 

Oratory. 

Abbe Maury, and subsequently Barnave, 
on the side of resistance ; Mirabeau, Danton, Saint- 
Just, Eobespierre, and, before all, Isnard and 
Vergniaud, as champions of the Eevolution. Few 
utterances have been more electric in their effect 
than the cry of Danton — " II nous faut de Taudace, 
et encore de Taudace, et toujours de l'audace" — at 
the moment when the allies were expected at the 
gates of Paris. Few things in modern oratory are 
more moving than Mirabeau's appeal to the memories 
of the Bartholomew massacre (April 1790), or than 
Vergniaud's indictment of the perfidy of the Court 
(June 1792). 

With the advent of Napoleon both the Journal 
and the Tribune were summarily snuffed out. The 
Tyranny of on e, shackled by a rigid censorship, was 
Napoleon, frightened into a fatuity which the tyrant 
himself was forced to grumble at. The other was 
dragooned, with not even that sign of remorse. The 
Tribunate, a body which spoke but did not vote, 



398 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

was the one rag of liberty which the consular 
government had to boast. And, during the brief 
span of its existence, it numbered more than one 
distinguished speaker — Joseph Chenier may be men- 
tioned — and one orator, Benjamin Constant. 1 But the 
boldness of these critics at once excited the wrath 
of the despot. The Tribunate was purged of their 
presence in 1802, and was finally abolished, "less as 
a change than an improvement of our institutions," 
in 1807. It is a stinging satire on the system of 
Napoleon that eloquence should have revived with 
the Eestoration. 

We pass from the old order to the new ; from the 

writers of the transition, and the small band whose 

leanings were wholly or mainly towards 

Romance. ' * . 

the past, to those who led the way in the 
romantic revival which was to dominate the future. 
In this movement there are three leading figures — 
Andr£ Chenier, Chateaubriand, and Madame de Stael. 
The earliest and, in many ways, the greatest of 
these is Chenier (1762-1794). The short span of his 

life was violently broken by the guillo- 

Andre Chenier. . ,.. 

tme ; but his genius had already found 
time to show itself in three several directions: in 
that loving presentation of Greek life and the 

1 Some words from the speech which drew down the wrath of 
Napoleon on Constant may be quoted : " Without the independence 
of the Tribunate, there would be neither harmony nor constitution. 
Nothing would be left but slavery and silence — a silence that all 
Europe would hear." The speech was made at the beginning o 
1800. See also M me - de Stael, Dix Annees d'Exil, chap. ii. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 399 

Greek spirit which is embodied in the Idylles ; 
in reflective poetry; and, finally, in the passionate 
cry of wounded honour and pity for persecuted 
innocence which rings through the lambes and lyrics 
of the last months. His method of working, as he 
tells us in one of the J&pitres, was to keep several 
pieces on the anvil at the same moment; and this 
makes it peculiarly hard to date any one of them, 
except the latest, with strict accuracy. On the whole, 
however, it seems clear that the Idylles, with perhaps 
some of the idyllic and reflective fragments, belong to 
the period between 1783 and the outbreak of the 
Eevolution ; the Jeu de Paume, and parts of the 
reflective poems, 1 to the earlier phases of the Eevolu- 
tion ; while the lambes and lyrics are stamped in 
every line with the passions and counter-passions of 
the Terror. 

Of these, the Idylles, though hardly in themselves 

the most perfect, have perhaps left the deepest trace 

upon the movement which they herald. 

Idylles. r . . - 

In the source of their inspiration, no less 
than in their spirit and manner, they are an en- 
tirely new thing in the literature of France, perhaps 
of Christendom. At one stroke they cancel the 
tradition of two hundred — it would hardly be an 
exaggeration to say two thousand — years, and carry 
us back to the spring-time and the dawn. Half a 
Greek himself, it is in the Greek masterpieces 

1 E.g., the closing passage of Hermes, which, alike from its temper 
and its mention of " ten years' composition," must surely belong to 
the last year or two of his life. 



400 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

that Chenier finds his model ; and with him, as at 
a later day with Morris, they become the source of 
a poetry which had all the effect of romance. It 
has sometimes been said that the spirit of Chenier is 
Alexandrine rather than, in the strict sense, Hellenic; 
nay, Eoman rather than Greek. The latter judgment, 
prompted by the obvious echoes of Propertius and 
other Latin elegists, is clearly mistaken. The former, 
correct possibly in the letter, is none the less mislead- 
ing. The vein of Theocritus which the French poet 
works is precisely not the Alexandrine: it is the 
purely pastoral and Sicilian. More than that, through 
the form of the Sicilian pastoral there shines, at least 
in the finest of these pieces, the light of a larger and 
more primitive inspiration — the inspiration of the 
Anthology, when the Anthology is most purely 
Greek ; a reflection even of the heroic age and of 
Homer. The freshness of the early world lies upon 
these poems — of a world fair and noble in itself, fairer 
and more noble by contrast with the faded graces and 
artificial sentiment of the society in the midst of 
which they were written. And this is the secret not 
only of their charm, but of the specifically romantic 
effect which they create. When, five - and - twenty 
years after his death, the poems of Chenier were at 
last published, it was the Idylles, above all, that 
became the rallying-cry of the romantic rebels; and 
on none, whether we consider the versification or the 
choice and treatment of subject, was this influence 
greater than on Hugo. As was to be expected, the 
influence is most apparent in his earlier collections— 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 401 

in Les Orientales and Les Voix InUrieures. But in one 
at least of his later poems, and that among the greatest 
(Le Satyre), we catch unmistakably a distant echo of 
L'Aveugle. By universal admission, the most notable 
of the Idylles are Lyde, Le jeune Malade, and La jeune 
Tarentine in the more pastoral vein ; Le Mendiant 
and L'Aveugle in the more primitive and heroic. 

The genius of Chenier is strangely complex. And 

the simplicity, freshness, vividness of the Idylles are 

hardly the most prominent qualities in 

Fragments J r * 

0/ Suzanne the rest of his early work. From the 

and Hermes. « . P ^ /ri , , 

mere fragment 01 buzanne (Susannah and 
the Elders) which has come down to us it is haz- 
ardous to draw conclusions. Yet the prose draft 
seems to show that description would have played a 
large part in it: not the frigid description of Saint- 
Lambert and Delille, but the decorative picture- work 
of Hugo or Gautier. And, if so, we have one more 
link between Chenier and the men of 1830. On the 
other hand, the note of reflection — and it is essentially 
philosophic reflection that he offers — found but a faint 
echo among the later heroes of romance. It belongs 
rather to the age of Buffon and the Encyclopedic ; 
at moments it recalls, as Chenier himself would have 
desired, the impassioned naturalism of Diderot, the 
large thought and utterance of Lucretius. Hermes, 
his chief effort in this sort, is, like so many others, 
a torso. If completed, it would have dealt with the 
triple theme of nature, man, and society. Fragment 
as it is, the main significance of the poem, apart from 
its glowing sense of life in nature, lies in detached 

2 c 



I 1 



402 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

lines and phrases, which are not seldom aflame with 
inspiration ; above all, in the rhythm, which once 
more showed the language to be capable of harmonies 
unsuspected by the generation of Voltaire, not fully 
mastered till that of Hugo. 

Until 1789, Chenier 'had lived much in a world of 
his own ; given up to friendship and literature ; con- 
cerning himself little with public interests. When 
the Eevolution came, he, like the other nobler spirits 
of his time, hailed it as the dawn of a new era. 
To this conviction the Ode on the Jen de Paume 
— not, however, one of his best efforts — gives vig- 
orous expression. But after the most crying abuses 
of the old order had been swept away, he took 
alarm, not unnaturally, at the unrest and turbu- 
lence which prevailed ; and from August 1790, the 
date of his Avis au Peuple francais, ranged him- 
self definitely with the Conservative, soon to be 
known as the Constitutional, party. He spoke often, 
in this sense, at the Feuillants and, till the fall of 
the Monarchy, wrote constantly in the Journal de 
Paris} He may have been right or wrong in his 
estimate of events. But it is impossible not to rever- 
ence the man who thus exposed his life in what he held 
to be the cause of justice and honour. If others had 
shown the same courage, the course of the Eevolution 
might possibly have been changed. He seems to have 
been consulted by Malesherbes at the trial of the king. 
He certainly blazed out in defence of Charlotte Corday 
in the summer of the same year (1793). He had his 

1 See his Prose Works edited by Becq de Fouquieres (1886). 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 403 

reward — the reward which he probably foresaw. 
Arrested in March 1794, he was thrown into prison ; 
lay there until, thanks to an imprudent interven- 
tion on the part of his father, he was recalled to 
the notice of the Committee of Public Safety; was 
tried and executed on the 7th of Thermidor, 1794. 
Had there been but two days' respite, his release 
would probably have been ensured by the fall of 
Robespierre (9th Thermidor). 

From the bitterness which poisoned the last two 

years of his life he drew a fresh source of inspiration. 

And never, save perhaps in the love poems 

Later poetry. . . 

which belong to the same period, has he 
risen so high as in these outpourings of righteous 
wrath and indignant pity. Since Juvenal lifted 
the avenging sword against the crimes of the Caesars, 
no nobler satire had appeared in Europe than those 
in which Chenier called down the vengeance of 
heaven upon the iniquities of the " peuple-roi" and 
the government it applauded. Nor had the note 
of tenderness ever before mingled with the cry of in- 
dignation, as it does in La Jeune Captive, the ode to 
Charlotte Corday, and the lines beginning " Triste 
vieillard, depuis que pour tes cheveux blancs." In 
a matter where resemblance of treatment may so 
easily be due to that of subject, it is perhaps perilous 
to assume conscious imitation. Yet it may well be 
that, in this as in other respects, the lambes were 
present to the imagination of a yet greater satirist, 
when he hurled the thunders and lightnings of Les 
Chdtiments. 



404 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

What, then, was the work accomplished by Chenier? 

In what sense is he the pioneer of Eomance? The 

answer is that he renewed both the form 

Place of Chenier. . . 

and the spirit ot French poetry. In respect 
of form, he was the first to break the shackles which 
the fashion of nearly two centuries had laid on the 
Alexandrine. In his use of the caesura and of en- 
jamhement — as again in the sonorous ring of such 
lines as "L'Ocean eternel oii bouillonne la vie" — he 
is the master of those who, a generation later, founded 
a new tradition in French poetry ; the master, above 
all, of Hugo. Nor is this merely a question of 
externals. Until the chains of the old forms were 
struck off, it was impossible that the new spirit 
should wake itself to life. The two things are in- 
separably bound together; they are different aspects 
of the same process. The change of spirit, here as 
always, is doubtless the more important. And here, 
too, the poetry of Chenier is a landmark, In the 
Idylles, French poetry once more became what it had 
not been since La Fontaine, perhaps since Du Bellay, 
" simple and sensuous." In the Iambes and Lyrics, 
notably in Charlotte Corday and La Jeune Captive, it 
takes the still deeper note of passion. The loss that 
the poetry of his country suffered by his early death 
may well be called irreparable. Had he lived, it is 
not impossible that French romanticism might have 
been saved from some of its extravagance. And in any 
case, the world can ill afford the loss of further poems 
so rich in inspiration, yet so pure and so chastened, as 
the Idylles and the later satires and lyrics. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 405 

If Chenier is the poet of the romantic dawn, Madame 
de Stael (1766-1817) is its orator, and, on one side at 

Madame least, the living embodiment of its ideas. 

de staei This, in itself, implies that her bent was 
more intellectual than imaginative. And it must be 
added that in her practical instinct, in her ceaseless 
endeavours for the political and social welfare of her 
generation, she is rather the heir of the Eevolution 
than the prophet, or even the critic, of Eomance. In 
spite of this, it is true that, even in its imaginative 
aspect, her work is of the utmost importance ; and 
that, not only in France but in all Europe, the 
romantic movement is deeply in her debt. 

Daughter of Necker and of that Suzanne Curchod 
for whom Gibbon so obediently " sighed," she played 
a large part in the active life of her time, as well as 
in letters ; and in an age which tested character to the 
utmost, all she did was to her honour. Her life as 
author naturally falls into two periods, of which the 
dividing line may be fixed in 1800, the year of De la 
Literature. During the earlier period her preoccupa- 
tion was rather with politics than literature ; and by 
subject, though not by date, two of her maturer 
writings attach themselves to the same period — her 
edition of the works of Necker, with a biographical 
introduction (1804), and the Considerations sur la 
Revolution frangaise, published shortly after her death 
(1818). We turn first to her political writings. 

The most important of these are Reflexions sur la 
Paix and Sur la Paix inUrieure (1794-95), together 
with the Considerations already mentioned. The two 



406 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

former are in the nature of political pamphlets; the 
Political latter is a historical work which, in all that 
writings, relates to Necker, the September massacres 
and the events immediately preceding them, or again 
the revolution of Fructidor, is a document of first- 
rate authority. By personal preference and convic- 
tion, Madame de Stael was an advocate of such a 
limited monarchy as then existed in England, and, 
with considerable modifications, had been established 
in France, at least on paper, by the Constituent 
Assembly (1789-91). And it is a striking testimony 
to her fairness and sagacity that, in the two pamphlets 
referred to, she should accept the Eepublic as, in the 
historical phrase of Thiers, "that which divides us 
the least," and as the one possible barrier against a 
return to the Eeign of Terror. With great cogency 
she calls on the adherents of limited monarchy to 
rally round a moderate republic, — an appeal which 
unfortunately was not successful. It is, however, 
to be noticed that she regards France as unalterably 
opposed to any form of personal government; and 
that, in spite of the predictions of Burke and of her 
own father, she has no fears of that military despotism 
which began to cast its shadow before it in 1796, and 
from which she was herself destined to suffer so 
deeply. In respect of style, it must be confessed 
that the Reflexions give no promise of the eloquence 
which, always perhaps rhetorical rather than literary 
in character, certainly cannot be denied to her later 
writings, — still less, if universal testimony be any 
guide, to her conversation. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 407 

Both in style and thought the Considerations are 

infinitely more mature. Indeed, even when we take 

account of all that has been written since, 

Considerations. . 

it may be doubted whether any judgment 
of the events between the first Ministry of Necker and 
the fall of Napoleon shows more insight or more free- 
dom from bitterness. On the Reign of Terror and the 
rule of Napoleon she doubtless had strong opinions. 
But this is, to say the least, permissible. And, quite 
apart from its value as a record of facts, the book 
offers a lively image of the temper engendered in 
a generous and sensitive nature by the successive 
tyrannies of the Jacobins and Napoleon, the "child 
and champion of Jacobinism." The one error which 
runs through the earlier part of the work is the 
failure to recognise that, after the king's attempt 
to crush the Revolution by an armed force (June, 
July, 1789), all confidence in him was necessarily 
destroyed ; and consequently that the endeavour to 
set up a constitutional monarchy, with the " deposed 
tyrant " for monarch, was foredoomed to failure. In 
style the Considerations, though lacking the final re- 
vision of the author, maintain a high level of natural 
eloquence. And there are passages — for instance, 
that in which she contrasts the solid gains of the 
Republic with the flashy triumphs and humiliating 
losses of the Empire — for which this praise would 
be faint indeed. 

We turn to her work as literary critic and as 
novelist. Without pausing on the Essai sur Us 
Fictions (1798), which is mainly significant for its 



408 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

exaggerated insistence on the moral function of the 
imagination, we pass at once to La Literature, the 
first work which gives any adequate impression of 
her genius. 

The full title of the book, De la Literature dans ses 
rapports avec les Institutions sociales, is itself enough to 

De la show the dominant intention of the writer. 

Literature. F rom beginning to end she strives to prove 
that there is an intimate connection between the life of 
a nation, its political and social organisation, and its 
literature ; and that progress in the latter region neces- 
sarily follows from progress in the former. This at 
once reveals both the intellectual affinities of the 
author and her conspicuous originality. If she goes 
back to Condorcet, or even Montesquieu, she reaches 
forward to such writers as Hegel and the large band 
of thinkers who, consciously or unconsciously, have 
drawn their inspiration from Hegel. Montesquieu had 
shown that the political and social institutions of a 
people are, or tend to be, the expression of its char- 
acter, as modified by climate and historical con- 
ditions. Condorcet, to whose authority the writer 
explicitly appeals, had assumed that, alike in his 
inner and his outer life, the reason of man has 
followed an intelligible law of progress. It was left 
for Madame de Stael to urge that, as the outward 
organism of a nation reflects its inner life and 
character, and as, like them, it is subject to con- 
tinuous progress, so the imagination in its turn is 
inseparably bound up with the more conscious pro- 
cesses of man's reason, practical as well as speculative, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 409 

and is continuously modified by their growth ; in other 
words, that it too is subject to the law of progress. 

In asserting the close bond which exists between 
the life of a nation and its literature, the authoress 
was doubtless at one with other writers of 
her time — with Herder, for instance, and 
with Goethe. Not only, however, did she reach this 
result without any aid from their writings, but she 
defined it more clearly ; she grasped its significance 
more fully; and she transformed it by a conception 
of progress which may, as we have seen, have hovered 
obscurely before the mind of Herder, but which, in this 
connection, was altogether alien to the speculations of 
Goethe. This is the enduring service which she ren- 
dered both to the theory and the practice of criticism. 
And though it drew on her sharp attacks from the 
opposite camp — from Fontanes in particular, and 
Chateaubriand — she stoutly held her ground ; and 
her constancy has been justified by time. Few 
ideas have done more to enlarge the scope of 
criticism, or to give it fresh energy. 

It must not be supposed that Madame de Stael 
was a fanatic of "perfectibility." In respect of 
Anticipations form, she is eager to admit, the limit 
o/Romawx. f perfection is soon reached; and, so 
far, it is idle to expect that the moderns can 
improve upon the ancients. But there remains 
the ever -flowing fountain of thought, and of feel- 
ing which itself is ceaselessly modified by pro- 
gressive changes of thought. Indeed, like most 
critics of her bent, she is apt to lay exaggerated 



410 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

stress on the matter, as opposed to the form, 
of imaginative art. She considers that "la haute 
litterature," following the model set by Montesquieu 
and Eousseau, will more and more come to concern 
itself with the promotion of "useful changes"; and 
she announces that "purely imaginative poetry," in 
which, however, she must not be understood to include 
the Drama, " will make no more progress in France." 
This shows the defects of her qualities. It shows also 
how far she was from sharing the ideal which was 
soon to be realised by the poets of romance. Yet in 
this, the closing part of the treatise, there is much 
that tends in exactly the opposite direction. She 
has some fruitful hints, in part to be carried out 
by the romanticists of the next generation, upon 
the changes which new currents of thought and a 
new social order might be expected to bring about 
in tragedy and comedy. And she goes far to pre- 
dict the splendid outburst of reflective poetry which, 
within the next sixty years, was to give a new birth 
to the literature of her country. Above all, she 
points with generous enthusiasm to the new sources 
of inspiration which lay in the "literatures of the 
north," Scandinavia, England, and Germany — a sub- 
ject to which she returns in the last and greatest 
of her critical writings, De VAllemagne (1810-13). 

Of all her works, this is the one which had the 

deepest influence and gives the clearest impression 

of her powers. Here, as in the earlier 

De l'Allemagne. . _ ., . . , , „ 

treatise, there is doubtless some lack ot 
proportion. She acknowledges to the full the sup- 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 411 

remacy of Goethe ; but she writes with hardly less 
ardour of Werner than of Schiller. This, however, is 
the zeal of the explorer. And it is as "voyager in 
strange seas of thought" and imagination that she 
must be judged. She was the first of her own, 
the first of any foreign, nation to feel the supreme 
beauty and importance of what had been done in 
Germany since Lessing ; the first to give a compre- 
hensive view of the literary movement which for 
the last half century had been carried forward across 
the Ehine ; the first to grasp its intimate connec- 
tion with the revolution in philosophic thought which 
had taken place at the same time, and which other 
writers, with the honourable exception of Coleridge, 
had greeted with ignorant and stupid ridicule. 1 The 
zest with which she throws herself into this strange 
world of poetry is astonishing, Still more sur- 
prising, perhaps, is the insight with which she threads 
her way through the intricacies of Kant, and fastens, 
without faltering, on the points at issue between him 
and the two earliest of his successors. A philosopher 
might find much to criticise in her own contributions 
to the subject. But her exposition of the speculative 
movement from Kant to Schelling — and this is the 
main task to which she sets herself — is singularly 
clear. Considering her lack of previous training, con- 
sidering, above all, the curious lapses of her earlier 
work in dealing with such matters, her success is 

1 Presque tout ce qui s'est fait depuis La Critique de la liaison 
pure, en litterature comme en philosophic, vient de l'impulsion 
donnee par cet ouvrage. — T. ii., p. 227. 



412 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

little short of a miracle. And this remains true 
when the largest possible allowance has been made 
for any help she may have received from Schlegel. 
The significance of this is far more than personal. 
It was the deliberate aim of the writer to undermine 
inspiration to the materialist creed which had rooted 

££3S» itself in FraQce durin § the last centur y> 

and poetry. an d to proclaim the speculative validity of 
the idealism to which, from the first, she had turned 
by instinct. The "philosophy" of La Literature, 
so offensive to Chateaubriand, is now thrown to 
the winds. The antagonist system is recognised as 
that which alone can justify the religious, moral, 
and literary ideals that the authoress has at heart. 
In the closing chapters she calls on her country- 
men to renounce the mocking spirit which, thanks 
to creed and circumstance, had become a second 
nature, and take to themselves a more generous 
temper and a nobler faith. There, she urges, is to 
be found their true glory; there, the "enthusiasm" 
which will give new life to the thought and poetry 
of France. It has been said, she remarks, that the 
genius of France has always lain in following the 
classical model. " For us, however, the choice is not 
between classical and romantic poetry, but between a 
mere imitation of the one and the inspiration which 
may be drawn from the other." And here experience, 
partial though it be, may serve as a guide. "Each 
time that an author has poured foreign sap into the 
orderly growth of French poetry, France has raptur- 
ously applauded. Eousseau, Saint -Pierre, Chateau- 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 413 

briand are all, it may be unconsciously, of the German 
school. They all draw their inspiration from their 
inmost soul." l 

In these sentences lies the sting of the whole 
treatise; and the next generation was to carry it 
home. It was just this, however, that 
aroused the wrath of Napoleon and his 
understrappers. Madame de Stael, who had been 
in partial exile since 1803, had ventured within 
fifty leagues of Paris, in order to superintend the 
printing of her book. Thanks to several suppres- 
sions, which throw a curious light on the inner 
mind of Napoleonic tyranny, she had succeeded in 
getting the manuscript passed by the censors. Sud- 
denly, after the last proof had been corrected (Oct. 
1810), she was informed by the Minister of Police, the 
same Savary who acted as chief instrument in the 
murder of the Due d'Enghien, that the whole im- 
pression had been seized and destroyed. "Your last 
work," he insolently wrote, " is not French. It is I 
who have stopped the printing of it. . . . It appears 
to me that the air of this country does not agree with 
you ; and we are not yet reduced to seek for models 
among the nations whom you admire." 2 Banished to 
Coppet, the authoress escaped in 1812, and made her 
way to Eussia. She fled from Moscow a month be- 
fore Napoleon's entry, and passed through Sweden to 
England. It was there that De VAllemagne was at 

1 De VAllemagne, i. 274 ; 200, 201. 

2 Preface to De V Allemagne. Savary's letter is also given in Dix 
Annees d'Exil, 



414 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

length published, appropriately enough within a week 
of the battle of Leipzig. 

To English readers Madame de Stael is best 

known by her two novels, Delphine (1802) and 

Corinne (1806), both of which offer an 

Hbt novels 

imaginative reflection of her passion for 
Benjamin Constant. Neither can claim the highest 
kind of originality. Both, in the main, rather go 
back to the models of the last century than create 
a new type of their own. Delphine, both in form 
and spirit, is of the stock of La nouvelle Hdo'ise ; as 
indeed, through all her work, Madame de Stael is 
the spiritual heir of Eousseau. Yet justice has hardly 
been done to the great power of portraiture which this 
novel displays, nor to the skill with which the situa- 
tion is so framed as to throw the characters into 
dramatic conflict. It is true that two at least of the 
leading figures are, more or less, drawn from life, — a 
circumstance which gave occasion to one of Talley- 
rand's happiest jests. But this is no detraction from 
the merits of the book, which rather gains than loses 
by painting a character so full of light and shade and, 
with all its brilliance, so born for suffering as that of 
the authoress. The same is true — as has generally 
been held, in yet greater measure — of Corinne. Here, 
however, the dramatic interest is entirely centred in 
the heroine ; the other characters are no better than 
lay figures ; and the heroine herself suffers from the 
drapery and the lime-lights which were intended to 
set her off. But, in spite of these drawbacks, the 
conflict between love and worldly convention, which 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 415 

forms the main theme of the book, is painted with 
extraordinary force. And in two respects Corinne 
may fairly be said to make an epoch in the history 
of the novel. It marks the decisive entry, fore- 
shadowed even in Delphine, of the " misunderstood 
woman," who was destined to play so large a part 
in the novel of the next two generations. And, if 
we except Wilhelm Meister and its direct offshoots, 
it is the first attempt to interweave themes of art 
and poetry with the dramatic interest which had 
hitherto been treated as the sole legitimate subject 
of the novelist. It must be admitted that in both 
points Madame de Stael has been surpassed by her 
successors, above all by George Sand, the most direct 
and perhaps the greatest of them. The discourses on 
art are too much in the nature of lectures ; and the 
Capitol, just because it is the Capitol, is a less appro- 
priate scene for the woes of the heroine than the 
green-room of Lucrezia Floriani or the meadows along 
the banks of the Floss. But the writer might well 
be proud to have opened a vein which was to prove 
so rich ; and we feel throughout that in her own per- 
sonality there is something greater than she was able 
to embody in her imaginative creations. 

To some, though to a much less, extent this is 
also true of her critical writings. For here too, 
Her relation though less and less as time went on, 
to romance. she was shackled by the traditions of 
the past. With some sides of the romantic move- 
ment, particularly those which were to appeal most 
to her own countrymen, she was in little sym- 



416 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

pa thy. To the cult of style, both for good and for 
evil, she was an utter stranger. Her own style has 
neither the grace of classical France, nor the richness 
and music of romance; neither the light touch of 
Voltaire, nor the deep melody, the vivid colouring, of 
Chateaubriand or Eousseau. On all that tended to 
sever art from the great issues of thought and passion 
she looked with suspicion. It was the author of 
Werther who went home to her heart ; she admired 
the later Goethe, but admired him with trembling. 
To Theophile Gautier and other devotees of art for 
art's sake, it is safe to say that she would have given 
no quarter. In the heir of the Eevolution this was 
natural enough. What is more strange is that the 
disciple of Eousseau should have had so blunt a sense 
of outward nature. Amid the glories of Coppet, she 
never ceased to sigh for the " fountain of the Eue de 
Bac." This, no doubt, was, at least in part, the cry of 
the exile. But there is nothing to show that she 
would have felt otherwise, had she been free to start 
for Paris the next hour. These may seem large abate- 
ments. But the other side of the account must not 
be forgotten. Her very shortcomings, if we except 
the lack of feeling for outward nature, bore witness to 
the danger of divorcing poetry from life, of " tramp- 
ling the roots of humanity under foot." She was not 
wrong in finding the seeds of this danger in the later 
work of Goethe and Schiller. She was right in warn- 
ing her countrymen against fostering their growth. 
And the history of French Eomance would have been 
different if her warning had taken fuller effect. As it 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 417 

was, her largeness of heart, her love of truth, and her 
faith in progress, formed a healthy influence in the 
dawn of French Eomance, and did something to coun- 
teract the more perilous tendencies — the love of 
phrases and posturings, the belief in style as apart 
from thought and matter, the recurrence to the ideals 
of the past not because they were true but because 
they were soothing and pretty, — all of which bulked 
largely in the later developments of the romantic move- 
ment, and are sufficiently evident even in her great 
contemporary, Chateaubriand. Still more important 
is the debt that France owes to her openness of mind, 
to the zeal with which she strove to break down the 
" Chinese wall " which, as she complains, had been 
built up between France and the rest of Europe, to 
the energy with which she set herself to show what 
the literature of her own country might draw from 
the new spirit and the new ideals which had stirred 
England and Germany to their depths. It is true 
that Germany had but little influence upon the sub- 
sequent course of the romantic movement in France. 
But the great need was to shake the imperturbable 
self-satisfaction of French classicism. And in this 
task she did yeoman's service. It is not so much by 
Delphine and Corimie, as by her political and critical 
works, above all by De VAllemagne, that she takes 
place in the literary history of Europe. 

Of the three writers now before us, the last, 
Chateaubriand, filled by far the largest 

Chateaubriand. n p , . 

space in the mmd ol his contemporaries, 
and has left by far the deepest mark on the 

2 D 



418 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

literature of his country. This is not merely the 
result of accident; of his long life (1768-1848); 
or of the prominent and honourable part which 
he played in politics. It is due, above all, to his 
brilliant originality. No writer since Eousseau had 
opened so many fresh fields to the imagination of his 
countrymen ; none had approached him in mastery of 
style. A critic might plead that the elements of his 
strange genius were imperfectly blended ; he might 
doubt whether all of them were so spontaneous, so 
genuinely sprung from the heart, as the author would 
have us to believe. But he could never question their 
presence, nor deny that they worked with electric 
force upon the generation that followed. 

The genius of Chateaubriand was late in ripening, 
and, when it did ripen, broke on the world with the 
suddenness of a Siberian spring. Apart from the 
Mdmoires d'Outre-tombe — and even they were begun 
before the fall of Napoleon — all his best work was 
published within the space of little more than a 
year: 1 Atala in 1801, Rend and Le Qdnie du 
Christianisme — of which Rend, like Atala, at one 

1 It is right to say that much of it goes back, in some form or 
other, to a considerably earlier date. Thus Atala was first written 
in 1791 ; but Chateaubriand himself states that one striking passage, 
the death of Atala, was entirely rewritten for publication ; and it 
may be suspected that the whole work went through unsparing 
revision. Rent, again, must go back to the years of Les Natchez 
(1793-98) ; for both it and Atala were fragments of that " epic " before 
they were worked into Le Genie. Le Genie was begun in 1798, and 
large parts of it were printed in London (1800) before the author 
returned to France ; but we know that the book was largely rewritten 
for publication in 1802, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 419 

time formed part — in 1802. His later works, 
memorable though they are, can hardly, with the 
exception of the Mimoires, be said to add anything 
substantial to our impression of his powers. The 
most important of them are Les Martyrs (1807), 
Ultindraire de Paris a Jerusalem (1811), and Les 
Aventures du dernier Abencerage (1826). 

Chateaubriand, like Madame de Stael, traces back 

his descent to Eousseau — not, however, to the thinker 

„. _,. so much as to the poet; not to the 

His relation r 7 

to Rousseau: Contrat Social so much as to the Con- 
fessions, the Reveries, and the second of 
the Discourses. The first necessity of his being 
was to expand itself before the public ; the first note 
of his genius, its brooding, yet passionate, individu- 
ality. Rent, under the thinnest of disguises, is 
Francois Eene de Chateaubriand. The author's weari- 
ness of life, his sense of the vanity of human 
things, are reflected and magnified in the character 
of his hero. In all this Chateaubriand was not merely 
following in the wake of the Confessions. He was 
moving a stage, and a long stage, farther along the 
path that Eousseau had struck out. It is one thing 
for an author to write, as Eousseau did with unflinch- 
ing fidelity, the secret history of his own life for the 
world to judge; quite another to project a glorified 
portrait of himself upon the screen for the world to 
weep over and admire. The difference of artistic 
method is no less marked than that of moral in- 
tention. The hand of the painter has a freer sweep ; 
his picture has a larger share of the ideal ; the reader 



420 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

comes to it with the feelings not of a judge, but 
a dispassionate onlooker. Hence it was that Rent, 
so skilfully drawn, reflecting so vividly a mood 
which, under one form or another, found a home 
in a thousand hearts, became the first of a long 
line : Harold, Manfred, Olympio, Eolla, and other 
" children of the century " ; not to speak of his own 
forerunners, Werther and Faust. His figure, to 
readers of the present day, may well seem fainter 
than others of his race. He has not the spiritual 
doubts, the agonised despair, of these ; nor the defiant 
revolt, the withering remorse, of those. But it is 
just here that his distinctive character is to be 
sought : in the vague sense of unrest and nothing- 
ness, in the weariness which does not spring from 
past labour or sorrow, in the melancholy for which 
no outward cause can be assigned. In the last 
resort this may be traceable to a half consciousness 
of weakness, to a sense of discord between the man 
and his surroundings or his natural task. Or it 
may spring from some entirely different cause. In 
any case, it was undoubtedly a marked feature of 
the generations immediately before and after Chateau- 
briand. It was not unknown to Goethe. It may 
even have blended with the sharper and more specific 
malady of Byron and George Sand. But nowhere is 
it painted with more force and fidelity than in 
Rend; and one can only regret that the picture, 
which might well have been left to stand on its 
own merits, is reinforced by a rather unpleasing 
and not altogether relevant love-story. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 421 

If the individuality of the writer, his "ennui" 
and melancholy, is the chief theme of Rend, quite 
Ataia,<wd a different note, though again one 
later romances. ^{^ recalls the voice of Eousseau, is 
struck in Atala. Here it is the "noble savage," 
the forests and prairies of the New World, the 
passions which tear the heart of man in all 
climes and ages, the warning voice of religion 
which strives to keep them within bounds, that 
Chateaubriand sets before us. And of all his 
imaginative works, this surely is the most original 
and the best. The theme is the simplest; the de- 
scriptive genius of the author has freer scope; the 
style is richer and more rhythmical than in any 
other of his writings. In the two latter points it 
marks what may fairly be called a new departure 
in French literature; Eousseau and, so far as de- 
scription is concerned, Bernardin de Saint - Pierre 
alone having prepared the ground. Here, however, 
the descriptions are more the bone and tissue of 
the piece ; and, as the nature of the landscape de- 
manded, they are more glowing than anything to 
be found even in Eousseau. 1 The same thing applies 

1 The following lines from another work, describing a night spent 
on the borders of Niagara, may be quoted : " Tantot la lune reposait 
sur un groupe de nuages, qui ressemblait a la cime de hautes mon- 
tagnes couronnees de neige. Peu a peu ces nues s'allongeaient, se 
deroulaient en zones diaphanes et onduleuses de satin blanc, ou 
se transformaient en legers flocons d'ecume, en innombrables 
troupeaux, errant dans les plaines bleues du firmament." — See 
Souvenirs d'ltcdie, Amerique, &c, t. i., p. 211. The passage suggests 
a comparison with Rousseau's description of a night spent " a la 
belle etoile" on the banks of the Rhone. 



422 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

to the style. It has not the plangent note of the 
later writings of Eousseau; still less has it the 
triumphant march of the Contrat Social. But in 
colour and music it commands resources which no 
writer had yet discovered in the language. It points 
forward to the day of Notre Dame and Les Lettres 
d'un Voyageur. Apart from the style, it is the 
picture of the virgin forests and prairies of the 
Mississippi, and of the Eed Indians who wandered 
among them, by which Atala takes rank. And here 
again the influence of Eousseau is not to be mis- 
taken. The abstract savage of the second Discourse 
has taken flesh and blood. The writer has crossed 
the Atlantic to meet him face to face; and the 
scenes through which he roves are painted from 
the life. The sober colouring of the Jura and 
lower Alps is exchanged for the gloom and glow 
of the primeval forest and its luxuriant vegetation. 
But the impulse which sent Chateaubriand on pil- 
grimage was the same that had made Eousseau a 
wanderer among men. He had the same contempt for 
the conventions and artifices of society ; the same love 
of solitude; the same craving for the primitive and 
the unsophisticated, — for that which seems to come 
to us direct " from the hand of the Creator." Of the 
later romances, Le dernier Abencerage (published 1826, 
written " nearly twenty years earlier ") is that which 
approaches most nearly to the level of Atala; and 
it contains one of the too rare lyrics — " Combien 
j'ai douce souvenance" — which prove how completely 
the author was master not only of the spirit, but 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 423 

the forms, of poetry. Save for the name and the date, 
one might almost believe it to have come from the 
hand of Hugo or Musset. Les Martyrs, in spite 
of its eloquence and the brilliance of its descrip- 
tions, is hardly of the same rank. There is more 
appearance of effort and, in point of style, too obvious 
an echo of TdUmaque. This, no doubt, has its sig- 
nificance. From the first Chateaubriand had in- 
stinctively shrunk from that side of romanticism 
which borders on realism, from that form of romance 
which absorbs realism as an element. In the preface 
to Atala — and the passage is repeated elsewhere in 
his works — he had written as follows : " The Muses 
are heavenly beings, who do not disfigure their 
features with grimaces. When they weep, it is 
with the secret desire of displaying their beauty/' 
Through the richness of form and colour, which 
constitute the essence of romance, he never ceased 
to seek the ideal type of beauty; and, for all his 
romanticism, it was this that drew him irresistibly 
to the poets of classical antiquity. Their influence 
was hardly less strong on him than upon Chenier, 
though it worked in a less direct and subtler 
manner. It gave simplicity and dignity alike to 
the style, conception, and execution of his imagina- 
tive work. It saved him from the extravagances 
which beguiled a later and more combative genera- 
tion. And if, as in Les Martyrs, he failed sometimes 
to distinguish between the true classicism and the 
false; if, as in his critical writings, he was troubled 
by sharp returns of injustice to Shakespeare and 



424 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

other heroes of romance, — these are the defects of 
his qualities, and must not be too bitterly resented. 

In Le Gdnie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand breaks 
entirely fresh ground. It is probable that no apolo- 
getic of modern times has left a deeper or 

Le Genie. ° . . . r 

wider impression. Issued within a few 
days of the publication of the Concordat (Easter, 
1802), it appeared, as the author says, "exactly at the 
right moment." For nearly ten years the Catholic re- 
ligion had been more or less proscribed, and its priests 
subjected to cruel outbursts of persecution. Now the 
tide was about to turn. Chateaubriand caught it at 
the flow, and did more than any other man to swell its 
advance. Nor was this due only to the passion with 
which he threw himself into the cause. It would be 
the height of injustice not to admit the originality and 
persuasive force of his argument. Casting aside the 
scholastic pleas which had hitherto formed the staple of 
such apologies, from the first page he takes wider and, 
for his own purpose, more commanding ground. The 
religious instinct, he urges, is bound up with all that 
is deepest and strongest in man's nature. It is not 
only the final, and most essential, sanction of his 
moral duties. It is interwoven with his most sacred 
memories ; it supplies at once the theme and the war- 
rant of all that appeals most keenly to his imagina- 
tion. It is on the two latter points, the emotional 
and imaginative value of religion, that he lays the 
greatest stress. It is this which constitutes the high 
originality of his treatise. The line of argument is 
hardly one that would have been chosen by one who 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 425 

loved truth for her own sake. The arbiter throughout 
is not reason but feeling. Yet it is just to remember 
that the circumstances were exceptional. The revolu- 
tionists — on great provocation, doubtless — had op- 
pressed the Church relentlessly. It was inevitable 
that, when their power was broken, the old feelings 
and habits of men should reassert themselves with 
irresistible force. It was to this spontaneous upheaval 
of long stifled emotion that Chateaubriand gave voice. 
And, even apart from personal reasons, 1 he would have 
been more than human had not emotion borne the 
chief part in his plea. Even with this allowance, the 
argument, in at least one crucial point, is more than 
open to question. Much, perhaps most, of it is directed 
to prove the necessity of religion in the vaguest and 
most general sense. Yet the general upshot of the 
whole is to recommend the doctrine, ritual, and priestly 
authority of one particular form of it, Catholicism. It 
is difficult not to regard this as a French variation on 
the British truculence of Mr Thwackum. And the 
later volumes of the Mdmoires lead one to suspect 
that the author himself may at moments have shrunk 
from the consequences of his plea. Yet, with all 
abatements, Le Genie remains a highly remarkable 
achievement, — the first of a long line of apologies 
which have put a new face on the relations between 
Christianity and modern thought. For that very 

1 The many deaths in his family, two of which had been executed 
during the Terror, while others, including his mother and sister, were 
imprisoned. "J'aipleure" et j'ai cru" is his account of his conver- 
sion. — Memoires, t. ii., pp. 134, 135. 



426 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

reason it was at first regarded somewhat askance by 
the more orthodox school of Catholics. A curious 
monument of this feeling is to be found in Le veritable 
Gdnie du Christianisme, published for the French emi- 
grants in London (1802) by Peltier, formerly editor of 
Les Actes des Apotres, the wittiest of the royalist organs 
during the early stages of the Revolution, and now of 
L'Ambigu, whose attacks were one of the chief griev- 
ances of Napoleon against the Government of Britain. 
The book is a reprint of the most famous writings of 
Bossuet ; and it testifies to the discontent of primitive 
orthodoxy with the innovations of Chateaubriand. 

Le Gdnie, however, is not merely a landmark in the 
history of European thought and religious feeling. It 
Chateaubriand W no less notable in the history of romance. 
as critic. j£ presents many of the glowing landscapes 

which have been already mentioned in connection with 
Atala ; and it opens an entirely new vein of literary 
criticism. On the former point there is no need to 
dwell further. The latter has a twofold bearing on our 
subject. In the first place, Chateaubriand, if not the 
earliest, was among the earliest to compare works of 
imagination from the point of view of the ideas which 
underlie and inspire them. 1 The danger of this method 
lies in the temptation to which the critic exposes himself 
of estimating imaginative creation rather by the truth, 
or supposed truth, of the ideas it embodies than by the 
success of the poet in giving them adequate expression. 
And from this danger Chateaubriand has by no means 

1 Two books of Le Genie, considerably more than a third of the 
whole work, are devoted to these questions. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 427 

escaped. There must, the reader instinctively feels, be 
something wrong in a method which ends in placing 
Zaire above the Iliad, and Alzire on a level with the 
Odyssey. For all this, it would be unjust to deny that 
a new weapon of criticism is here grasped by Chateau- 
briand ; and that, in the hands of one less consumed 
by the zeal of the Lord's house, such a method may 
lead, and has not seldom actually led, to results of 
great value. And, though the results of Chateau- 
briand may sometimes startle us, it was an inestim- 
able service to free criticism from the merely verbal 
and formal questions with which the Augustans had 
concerned themselves — to insist that the first business 
of the reader is to throw himself into the life and 
thought and atmosphere of the poet he would judge. 
Doubtless, his own sympathy, as romanticist, with the 
past rendered this task peculiarly congenial to our 
author. But that is precisely what makes him so 
important. Nothing had been so fatal to Augustan 
criticism as its contempt for all that was " barbarous " 
and " Gothic." And this pitiful contempt received its 
death-blow from Chateaubriand. 

As to the second point, Chateaubriand was again 
among the first to call criticism from the narrow and 
barren task of finding fault to the far higher task of 
''appreciating beauties." To seize on that which is 
best — and this commonly means that which is most 
distinctive and original — in a given writer, and to 
show its full bearing and significance, — that is the 
ideal of modern criticism. And among those who 
built up this ideal, Chateaubriand may claim an hon- 



428 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

oured place by the side of Goethe and Charles Lamb 
and Coleridge. A glance at the Preface to Cromwell will 
show how deeply the later romanticists of France were 
indebted to him on this point, as on so many others. 

It will be seen that, of the three writers who form 
the subject of this section, Chateaubriand contributed 
_. . , by far the most to the advancing tide 

His importance J ° 

in the history of romance ; that he is, perhaps, the only 

of romance. -. ,-. * -,-. , n j 

one who, in the full sense, can be called 
romantic. In his reversion to medievalism, he fol- 
lows, it need hardly be said with a difference, the 
path which had already been trodden by Goethe in 
Germany and by Coleridge in England. By his love 
of outward nature and his genius for giving the glow 
of colour or the spell of mystery to her more un- 
familiar aspects, he again ranges himself with Coleridge, 
and with Wordsworth as he was in those moments 
when he approached most closely to the romantic 
spirit. Finally, in his world-weariness and brooding 
melancholy, he recalls, again with a difference, the 
Werther of Goethe, and strikes the note which was to 
be given back with resonant echo from the poetry of 
Byron. 1 In one respect, it must be added, he stands 
alone. By Le G-Snie die Ohristianisme he exercised a 
direct influence on the religious feeling of his genera- 
tion, to which, except possibly in the case of Coleridge, 
there is nothing analogous in the history of his time. 
And this too, for good or for evil, was among the 
workings of romance. 

1 A curious passage on Byron, and his debt to Chateaubriand, will 
be found in the Memoir es, vol. ii. 



FKANCE AND ITALY. 429 

Among the writers of the Eepublic and Empire 
there remain three who stand apart from the rest; 

joubert, two of them, at any rate, anticipating in 

senancour. a mar k e d degree the thought and senti- 
ment of the period which was to follow. These are 
Joubert, Senancour, and Joseph de Maistre. 

The two former need not detain us long. Both, in 
different ways, embody the discouragement, the par- 
alysis of energy, which not unnaturally followed on 
the extravagant hopes of the Revolution. Joubert 
(1754-1824) is known only by his Maximes, religious, 
moral, and literary, which were edited after his death, 
first by Chateaubriand (1838), then by Eaynal (1842). 
This form of literature, in which the French stand 
almost alone, is only tolerable when it crystallises a 
highly distinctive outlook upon life in a perfectly 
chiselled style. With the latter of these conditions 
Joubert not seldom complies ; and in his literary 
maxims — for instance, those on the Greek and the 
Latin genius, or again, to take a very different 
illustration, on the spirit of Voltaire — he fulfils 
the former also. Even in the moral maxims the 
thought is often ingenious, sometimes profoundly 
true. But it lacks the seal of a vigorous character 
and intellect. And for that reason Joubert can 
hardly be placed among the supreme masters of the 
Maxim: not with Vauvenargues, still less with La 
Eochefoucault or Pascal. Far more distinctive is the 
work of Senancour (1779-1846). His chief book, 
Obermann (1804), is the history of a soul severed from 
the world and striving to live its own life face to face 



430 EUKOPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

with nature. The void of such a life, the discourage- 
ment and weariness which fall upon it but never 
entirely overcome it, are painted with extraordinary 
force. And in its " profound inwardness/' if not in its 
"austere sincerity ," it anticipates by five-and-twenty 
years the mood which, with a far stronger leaven of 
passion, was one of the chief sources of the " literature 
of despair." Hence the deep hold which it had on 
George Sand and, at a later time, on Arnold. 1 That is 
its chief importance to the literary historian. But 
even those who care little for such history can hardly 
fail to be arrested by the unaffected truthfulness with 
which a unique, if morbid, experience is recorded. 

Lack of vigour is the last charge that can be brought 
against de Maistre (1753-1821). 2 The most combative 
Joseph de of writers, his life was one long challenge to 
Maistre. ^ e acce pted dogmas of his day. The glove 
was first thrown down in Considerations suv la France 
(1796) ; and this was followed by Le Principe Gendra- 
teur des Constitutions Politiques (1809) and Le Pape 
(1819) ; not to mention other works of less import- 
ance. It was the mission of de Maistre to pour scorn 
on the Eevolution, and on the beliefs, political, moral, 
and religious, which lay behind it. And, gifted as he 

1 The usual edition of Obermann has a Preface of great interest 
by George Sand, who makes a comparison between Senancour, 
Chateaubriand, and Byron. The two poems of Arnold, with the 
appreciation contained in their notes, make it unnecessary to say 
more. 

2 Joseph, the elder brother of Xavier, de Maistre was by birth a 
Savoyard ; and his life was passed, first as Judge, then (after the 
Revolution) as Ambassador, in the service of the King of Sardinia. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 431 

was with an unerring instinct for fastening on the 
vital points at issue between the combatants, as well 
as with a style abounding in vigour and sparkle, he 
performed the task to perfection. The pity is that 
these great qualities should be wedded to a love of 
paradox, not to say a genius for sophistry, 1 which goes 
far to destroy their value, and which, lovingly fostered, 
strengthened its hold upon him with each succeeding 
publication. The whole system of de Maistre springs, 
in the last resort, from two seminal ideas : the idea of 
ms idea of Sovereignty and the idea of the State as 
the state. a na ^ ura l organism, whose growth is de- 
termined by original character and by historical 
conditions. Of these, the latter is by far the more 
pregnant and deep-reaching. But as time went on, 
it came more and more, in the mind of the author, 
to be overshadowed by the former. It is, therefore, 
in the earlier works that his better self is to be 
found. The abstract man of Eousseau and the 
" philosophers," he argues, has no existence. Man 
is always the product of a particular country and 
particular institutions; "a Frenchman, an Italian, 
a Eussian " ; not a man pure and simple. 2 From this 
it follows that no " constitution," which rests on the 
assumption that man is a being of pure reason, with- 
out passions and without a distinctive temperament, 

1 See, for instance, his Lettres sur V Inquisition Espagnole (1815), 
in which he proves, to his own satisfaction, that the Inquisition " is 
by its nature good, mild, and conservative, which is the unvarying 
and indelible character of all ecclesiastical institutions." — Letter I, 
(p. 225 ; ed. Brussels, 1844.) 

2 Considerations j p. 70, 



432 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

is worth the paper on which it is written ; nay, that 
the very attempt to commit it to paper, to embody it 
in a formal document, is an infallible mark of folly 
and incapacity. The true constitution of a nation is 
not that which is made, but that which grows ; which 
has been formed slowly and silently, and for that 
very reason has become one with the very life of 
the people, both individually and collectively. Any 
endeavour to alter the direction of that growth, to 
destroy any of its old conditions, or to put new ones 
in their stead, is foredoomed to failure. And of this 
there can be no proof more startling than the rapid 
succession of constitutions in France during the re- 
volutionary ferment — three, if not four, within the 
space of five years — and the enormous number of 
paper laws, at the rate of ninety-five to two hundred 
for every month, which are presented for our admira- 
tion. 1 Growth, development, progress there undoubt- 
edly is. The very analogy of the natural organism 
both admits this and proclaims it. But it must be 
growth within the limits of the original character and 
the acquired characteristics ; a growth silent as that 
of the grass, not noisy with the crash of machinery or 
the shouts of windy declamation. 2 

In this there is much truth, though the latter part 
of it suffers from the same fallacy that has already 
of sovereignty : met us in Burke : the assumption that 
LePape. foe direction and limits of a nation's 

growth are unalterably fixed from the beginning ; 

1 Considerations, pp. 72, 73. Principe Cenerateur, pp. 167-176. 
2 u Considerations, pp. G6 y 67, 89. Principe Generateur, p. 184. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 433 

that to remove the most glaring defects is a task 
entailing more evil than good ; that to introduce 
new elements of life is either impossible, or is 
more likely than not to end in death. 1 All these 
objections, however, are as nothing when compared 
with those raised, at least in its later developments, 
by the doctrine of Sovereignty. Like Eousseau, de 
Maistre is convinced that every political community 
has an inherent right — a right limited only by con- 
siderations of justice and expediency — to control the 
members who compose it. Unlike Eousseau, he places 
this control not in the people at large, but the ex- 
ecutive. 2 And, for reasons which lay very close to 
his heart, to him the only full and perfect form of 
executive is monarchy. It is a monarch only who, 
especially in a large State, can secure unity. It is 
only through monarchy that the State can place itself 
on the same level of divine sanction as the Church. 
And since, in its essence, the life of the State is religi- 
ous, or is nothing, — since, moreover, all the great States 
of modern Europe, and none more clearly than France, 
were founded by the Church — it is only logical that 
the inner truth of things should find expression in 
their outward organisation. 3 In any case, the author- 
ity of the Church — and that is explicitly declared to 
mean the Papacy — remains, in the last resort, intact 
over the State. It is in the spiritual sovereignty of 
the Pope that the civil power finds its only full sanc- 

1 Principe Generateur, pp. 196-200. 

2 Le Pape, pp. 19-23. 

3 Principe Generateur, pp. 183, 179, 180. Le Pape, p. 140. 

2 E 



434 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

tion and consecration. It is to that sovereignty alone 
that the dispensing power, in those rare cases when 
its exercise is necessary for the protection of subjects 
against their civil sovereign, can safely be entrusted. 1 

Apart from its ecclesiastical bias, which threw it 
out of date from the beginning, this argument is 
ms relation hardly to be reconciled with that which 
to Burke. j^ a i rea< jy been considered. The earlier 
argument was essentially historical in character. 
De Maistre, like Burke, condemned innovations in 
the name of human nature and the unbroken record 
of experience. Here, however, he turns round, and, 
in spite of all efforts to disguise it, suddenly pres- 
ents us with the principle of divine right : the 
divine right of the monarch which, once estab- 
lished, is treated as sacrosanct for all time ; the 
divine right of the Papacy, consecrated by a grant 
direct from heaven. 2 Qualifications, no doubt, there 
are ; and it is only fair to say that they are dictated, 
not only by the caution, but the honesty, of the 
writer. 3 But the effect of these is rather to weaken 
the force of the abstract argument than to recon- 
cile it with the historical plea of which it is sup- 
posed to be the sequel. It is in that historical 
plea that the author is at his best. There lies his 

1 Le Pape, pp. 126, 137, 140, 157-160, 233. 

2 This is supplemented in a later writing by the famous description 
of the Hangman as the " corner-stone of civil society." See Soirees de 
St Petersbourg, chaps, i. and vii. The paradox would have delighted 
Hobbes, between whom and de Maistre an instructive parallel might 
be drawn. 

3 Le Pape, pp. 214-224, 225-237, 320-327, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 435 

substantial service to European thought. To readers 
of the day, who were little acquainted with Burke, he 
doubtless seemed even more original than he is. And 
neither in range nor in depth, neither in speculative 
genius nor in the imaginative power which clothes the 
skeleton of abstruse argument with flesh and blood, 
are even his highest achievements, the Considerations 
and Le Principe GtnArateur, to be compared with the 
Reflections, which preceded the one by six and the 
other by close on twenty years. But the lesson was 
none the worse for being repeated. And, however 
much he may have owed to Burke's instruction, no 
one can deny that de Maistre had made it entirely 
his own, or that he expounded it in a style of ex- 
traordinary brilliance. In speculative matters he 
marks, among French writers, that revolt against the 
spirit and methods of the eighteenth century which, 
in the domain of pure literature, is bound up with 
the names of Chateaubriand and Madame de Stael. 

Looking back over the period we have traversed, 

we can hardly fail to recognise a case of arrested 

Reaction development. During the years immedi- 

towards ately preceding the Be volution, the air 

Classicism. j»nr» u • ,i i • i 

was tull of revolt against the classical 
canons. All the more vigorous minds were in 
eager quest of new forms, new methods, new sources 
of inspiration. With the Bevolution and the wars 
that followed, the tide suddenly turned. The search 
for new light still continued ; but it was confined to 
the small band of literary, and for the most part 



436 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

political, rebels. The mass of cultured opinion was 
now thrown into the opposite scale. And in this scale 
it remained until the approach of the great uprising 
in 1830. The cause of this change is not far to seek. 
The Eevolution directed the minds of men into other 
channels. The classical ideal, which it brought into 
politics, was not unnaturally smuggled back into 
literature also. Finally, the Empire, jealous by its 
very nature of new ideas and intellectual independ- 
ence, imposed a yoke upon men's minds which only 
the most vigorous were capable of throwing off. The 
result was that, as Napoleon himself was fain to 
lament, the literary annals of the Empire are, if we 
except the work of the two great rebels, inexpressibly 
barren. And the same causes, with the same effects, 
continued to operate, though with diminished force, 
during the Eestoration. So it was that the gradual 
emancipation, which promised so fair before the 
Eevolution, was suddenly suspended. And when the 
forces of progress were again set free, it was inevitable 
that they should take the road of violent innovation. 
The literary upheaval of 1830, as Hugo always insisted, 
was the counterpart of the political upheaval of 1789. 

The story of Italian literature in the last quarter 
of the eighteenth century presents one marked 
peculiarity. In England, France, and 
Germany the men of geuius, at least in 
their earlier and more spontaneous works, were with 
one accord whole-hearted for romance. In Italy, too, 
the romantic leaven was astir. But the one man of 






FRANCE AND ITALY. 437 

genius whom the period produced was decisively 
classical in his bent, — perhaps the greatest of those 
who in modern times have followed the classical 
ideal. Hence, by the accident of genius, the romantic 
movement was unexpectedly set back. Had the 
great powers of Alfieri been thrown into the other 
scale, the history of these years would have been 
strangely different. 

Three great figures stand out in the literature of the 
earlier part of the century. Of these, Vico had now 
(1775) been dead for thirty years (1744), while 
Metastasio and Goldoni still survived — the former till 
1782, the latter till 1793. The labours of both, how- 
ever, were at an end. The last works of Metastasio, 
who since 1730 had resided at Vienna, were written 
before 1770. The last important work of Goldoni, 
H Bitrbero Benefico, originally written in French as Le 
Bourru Bienfaisant, belongs to that year \ and for the 
rest of his days he lived at Paris. For the moment, 
the stage was occupied by smaller men. It was 
occupied yet more by the various academies and 
literary clubs which, always strong in Italy, never 
perhaps flourished so abundantly as during the 
eighteenth century. It is enough to mention the 
Florentine Accademia della Crusca, which has passed 
into a byword of classical pedantry ; and the Societa 
del Caffe, founded in 1764 at Milan. 

The latter, in particular through its Journal, II 

societa del Caffd (1764-66), was the chief channel 

caffe. through which a new stream of influence 

was brought into the literature of Italy — that of Vol- 



438 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

taire and the Encyclopedists. The chief names con- 
nected with this movement are those of Algarotti, 
the two brothers Pietro and Alessandro Verri, and, 
above all, Beccaria, whose treatise, Dei Delitti e delle 
Pene (1765), forms the abiding monument of the 
Italian " enlightenment," and wielded a deep influ- 
ence over the party of humanitarian reform through- 
out Europe. 

The fruits of such a movement were, from the 
nature of the case, intellectual or political rather 
than literary; though it is significant that Beccaria 
brought many innovations, largely drawn from French 
sources, into the language ; and that Alessandro Verri 
contributed to H Gaffh a spirited attack — of which, 
however, he subsequently repented — on the purist 
Vocabulary of Delia Crusca. Yet it was from this 
small circle of Encyclopedists that Eomanticism 
enlisted one of its earliest adherents, the same 
Alessandro Verri. It is with him and Cesarotti 
(1730-1808) that the early history of romance in 
Italy is mainly concerned. 

In Italy, as elsewhere, translation played a large 
part in the beginnings of the romantic revival. And, 

Romance: as a translator, Cesarotti was indefatig- 

cesarotti. ^e. As to his choice of subject he was 
by no means particular. If he took the semi- 
romantic Sdmiramis, he took also the classical 
Mahomet and Mort de G6sar from Voltaire (1762). 
Demosthenes and Juvenal may be regarded as 
neutral ground. But, in the main, he turned by 
preference to what may fairly be counted romantic 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 439 

sources: to Prometheus Vinctus (1754), to the Iliad 1 
(1786-1795), to Gray's Elegy (1772), and, far more 
significant than all of these, to Macpherson's Ossian 
(1763-1772). The last makes an epoch in the history 
of Italian literature. It opened the gates to the love 
of nature, the cult of melancholy, the memories of the 
past, which, here as elsewhere, formed the raw material 
of romance. The fame of Cesarotti's translation — 
skilfully varied from blank verse to ottava rima and 
lyric measures, according to the sense — spread far and 
wide through Italy. It has left unmistakable traces 
on the work of I. Pindemonte, of Monti, and, despite 
his denials, of Foscolo. But on no imagination did it 
fasten so deeply as on that of the young Corsican who 
was born between the dates of the two issues, and 
whose constant companion it was from Egypt to Saint 
Helena. 2 

It would, however, be a grave injustice to consider 
Cesarotti merely as a translator. Apart from poems, 
FUosojia deiie which offer little worthy of notice, he is 
Mngwe. fae author of a Saggio sulla Filosqfia 
delle Lingue (1785), which is greatly in advance of 
its time. Language, he urges, is a thing of essen- 
tially spontaneous growth. All dialects, at the be- 

1 There are two Iliads : one faithful, in prose ; the other {La Mortc 
di Ettore), with considerable liberties, in verse. The latter is, what 
the author protested it was not, "a reckless graft of sacred on 
profane." 

2 Cesarotti always retained his interest in the primitive poetry of 
the smaller nations— e.g., that of Illyria. See his letter bo Herich : 
" La mia consanguineta con Ossian forma un rapporto di cognazione 
tra lei e me." — Opere, xxxiii. 315. 



440 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ginning, are equally barbarous; it is only by the 
"shock" of one with the other that any advance 
is possible, or any chance of refinement and en- 
richment to be won. And the moment a language 
ceases to enrich itself by the incorporation of new 
words and new turns of speech — by drawing at once 
upon the "treasury" of kindred dialects, foreign 
languages, and, above all, upon the material offered by 
the unceasing progress of the arts and sciences — from 
that moment it must be accounted dead. Thus the 
recognition of a distinctively literary dialect, advan- 
tageous as it is in many ways and perhaps necessary, 
is manifestly beset with dangers. And those dangers 
can only be averted if the literary language is kept in 
the closest touch, on the one hand, with the language 
or languages of common speech ; on the other hand, 
with the ever-widening experience of daily life and 
the new words or phrases in which our own or other 
nations have embodied it. 1 That these were burning 
questions in Italy, with its academical pedantries and 
its amazing wealth of competing dialects, may readily 
be imagined. And for the last fifty years they had 
been hotly debated : by Manni, for instance, and 
Kosasco, as champions of the Tuscan supremacy, on 
the one side ; by Marcello, Zanotti, and the authors of 
II Caffd, as defenders of liberty, upon the other. 2 But 
Cesarotti raised the debate to a higher level. With 

1 He suited the action to the word by a free coinage of compounds 
in his translations of Homer and Ossian : lungi - saittante, occhi- 
azzurro, gemmi-sparso, and the like. 

2 The battle had largely raged round the works of Goldoni, whose 
Venetian idiom offended the pedants. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 441 

him it ceases to be a mere battle of the dialects. It 
opens on the wider issues which, as Herder had 
already discerned, were bound up with much of what 
was most fruitful in the romantic revolution. 

The cult of Ossian and the English was soon to 

be followed by an act of homage to the Germans. 

This was the work of Bertola, in his 

Bertola. /i*rn,i\ 

Idea delta Letteratura Alemanna (1784). 
The critical part of this is slight, and can hardly 
be said to display much discernment. After a well- 
merited rebuke to those French critics, Bouhours 
and others, who had cast scorn on the literary 
efforts of the Germans, and a brief sketch of the 
Minnesingers and Meistersingers, he passes rapidly 
to the poets of the first half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, lingering with peculiar affection on Haller 
and the other poets of nature. And with them, 
the writers who had themselves been moulded by 
Thomson and the English, it would seem that his 
admiration stopped. For the later outgrowths of 
German poetry, for the more original and romantic 
turn given to it by Lessing and Goethe, he shows 
but little sympathy. He is much shocked by the 
romanticism, such as it is, of Emilia G-alotti} and 
still more by the ruthless disregard of the unities 
and the generally " monstrous " characteristics which 
confronted him in Gotz. It would have been in- 
teresting to learn what he thought of Die Rauber. 
But on that point he is discreetly silent, probably 

1 See, in addition to the Idea, his letter to Ippolito Pindemonte, 
of Dec. 15, 1783 (Opere, t. ii., pp. 235, 236). 



442 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

from ignorance. It seems hardly credible that the 
same explanation should hold for his neglect of 
Werther. But the fact remains that the book which 
had gone the round of Europe finds no mention in 
his pages. The same love of the older fashions re- 
appears in the translations, which form the most 
valuable part of the book, and are executed for the 
most part with uncommon skill. But the greatest 
names are ill represented; and, as a relief from 
twenty -seven of Gessner's Idylls, we have to be 
content with a single poem, Das Veilchen, by Goethe. 
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the 
fruits borne by Bertola's enterprise should be com- 
paratively small. And it would be hazardous to 
assert that he did more than reinforce that love of 
the natural and idyllic which had already established 
itself in Italy, or that what was truly original and 
vital in the genius of Germany made itself felt in 
any Italian writer earlier than Foscolo. 

With Alessandro Verri (1741-1816) must close our 

sketch of the early stages of romance. His chief 

works are Avventure di Saffo (1780) and 

A ' VerrL Notti Bomane (1792-1804). Both bear 
witness to the influence of classical antiquity upon the 
romantic revival. The former is a romance on the life 
of the Lesbian poetess, containing some vivid passages 
of description and some fine translations from the 
fragments of her poetry. The latter is a series of 
imaginary discourses between the spirits of the great 
Romans, Caesar and Brutus, the Gracchi, Cicero, and 
the rest. It is mainly remarkable for the description 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 443 

of the opening of the tombs, which seems manifestly 
inspired by Dante, at the beginning ; and the un- 
expected assault upon the " destructive genius " of the 
Eomans, "oppressors upon system, great rather than 
good," at the close. It had, however, a great vogue in 
its own day, and later. Not only did it run through 
fifty editions in it's own country, but it was translated 
into most languages of Western Europe. It is further 
significant of his place in the romantic movement 
that he should have made a translation of Hamlet, 
and begun one of Othello, 

In Parini (1729-1799), the most accomplished artist 
among Italian poets of his time, we find a marked 
classicism: reversion "to the classical tradition. Odes 
Parini. on Education, Imposture, Inoculation, a 
satire in four books on the social follies and cor- 
ruptions of the day, — these bear the seal of their 
origin upon their face. Yet the style is so clear- 
cut and, in some of the odes at any rate, the 
hand of the poet is so firm, and his imagery so 
finely chiselled, as to deserve the name " classical " 
in the better sense — classical, that is, not after the 
fashion of the Augustans, but of antiquity ; with a 
touch of Horace and even, at times, Schiller. In 
H Giorno, 1 which is the most ambitious and the 
best known of his works, there is something of the 
same classical ring, though, from the nature of the 
case, in a lower key. The very title of the piece, 

1 The first part, 11 Mattino, was published in 1763; the second, 
11 Mezzogiorno, in 1765. The other two were not published till after 
his death : La Notte, indeed, was never finished. 



444 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

"the four parts of the day," is in all probability a 
sarcastic reference to the numerous poems of that 
name which the rather barren invention of early 
romance had devised as a counterpart to the four 
seasons of the year. But the artistic genius of Parini 
converted the mild sentiment of the descriptive poets 
into a brilliant series of cameos, representing the 
fashionable vices and follies of society. The dandy's 
toilet, the ministries of the cavalier' servente, the glut- 
tony of the dinner-table, the afternoon drive, the rout, 
the grand lady's lap-dog, — all come in for their share 
of ridicule. And each picture is touched off with ex- 
quisite finish. Of all the satires of the century, it is 
that which most nearly recalls the atmosphere of the 
Latin poets. No doubt Parini is sometimes a victim 
to the perils of artificial diction. What is an un- 
lucky poet to do when he has chosen to write of 
hair-powder and lace ruffles and strawberry ices ? 
The wonder is rather that II G-iorno should contain 
so few of these elegant inanities. The only other of 
Parini's writings which need be mentioned is / 
Principj della Lettere, a rather vague treatise on the 
theory of imaginative art, which, in spite of certain 
compromises, embodies a tolerably complete accept- 
ance of classical ideals. 1 

Of the later romanticists belonging to our period, 
Later Romance : the most notable are Casti, the two 
casti. brothers Pindemonte, Monti and Foscolo. 

Casti (1721-1813) is best known by his "zooepia," 

1 A pleasing picture of Parini in his last years will be found in 
Jacopo Ortis (pp. 99-107 : eel. Lemonnier, 1850). 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 445 

Gli Animali Parlanti (1802). Its iuordinate length — 
twenty-six cantos— makes it heavy reading; and the 
satire, political and social, good though it often is, 
inevitably becomes monotonous. 1 Its main interest 
for us lies in its more formal aspect ; in its revival of 
the lighter vein of satire, so peculiarly suited to the 
Italian genius ; in its reversion to the framework of 
the beast -epic, which was adopted about the same 
time in the "profane Bible" of Goethe, and which 
may fairly be regarded as a symptom of the poet's 
romantic leanings. A more distinctly romantic and 
a more lively, if less ambitious, performance is the 
earlier Poema Tartaro. Under a veil of Eastern 
scenery and a romantic story, it is in fact a biting 
satire on the Court and character of the Empress 
Catherine, which Casti studied from the life in 1778. 
Written in ottava rima, which he was afterwards to 
exchange for the sesta of his zooepia, it is chiefly 
interesting to the English reader for the influence 
which it clearly had on the general tone and on some 
of the incidents, particularly of course in the Eussian 
cantos, of Don Juan. But, amusing as it is, it lacks 
the brilliance of the English poem ; it lacks still more 
the scope and depth of Byron's satire. It forms, how- 
ever, an important link in the chain of satire which 
comes down from Pulci, Ariosto, and Berni; which 
was taken up by Fortiguerri in his RicciardeMo (pub- 
blished 1736) ; and which attaches itself to our own 
literature by the great name of Byron. 

1 On account of its laboured satire, Grimm described it, not alto- 
gether unjustly, as "an intolerable poem." — Reinhart Fuchs, p. xi. 



446 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Of Ippolito Pindemonte it is not necessary to say- 
much. He is the chief representative of the senti- 
mental vein, which the Italians drew from 
Gray and Thomson, and, in a less degree, 
from Gessner. His chief work is Le Poesie Campestri 
(1785), and this was followed by I Viaggi (1793), a 
social satire, somewhat after the fashion of Cowper, 
with a distinct tinge of Parini. Bertola and Monti 
also wrote poems of sentiment ; but they have other 
titles to fame. 

Of Bertola something has already been said. It 

remains only to speak of Monti. On his work, as 

sentimental poet, there is no need to linger. 

Monti. . 

The very titles of his pieces, tintusiasmo 
malinconico, and the rest, are enough to show the 
familiar vein in which he was working. In political 
poetry, satiric or otherwise, and in the drama he is 
more original. His work in the former field belongs 
to his later years ; and it is chiefly memorable as a 
weather-chart of the storms through which Italy was 
passing, under stress of the Eevolution in France. 
The earliest and best known of these occasional pieces 
is that on the death of Basville, the French envoy 
who was brutally assassinated at Eome a few 
days before the execution of Louis XVI. (January 
1793). In this lurid performance Monti represents 
Voltaire, Eousseau, and other harbingers of the 
Eevolution as marshalling the hosts of darkness 
against the life of the martyr king, while Pius VI., 
a second Moses, strives to animate the flagging 
ranks of the faithful. The papal efforts are in 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 447 

vain. And while the spirits of Damiens, Eavaillac, 
and other regicides exult around the scaffold, the 
mob surges up to lick the blood of its slaughtered 
benefactor. The poem — one of the many in terza 
rima produced at this epoch — excited angry pro- 
tests from the Liberals, notably from Gianni and 
Salfi. The times speedily changed ; and Monti, who 
was nothing if not a time-server, found no difficulty 
in changing with them. The Bassvilliana was re- 
issued with a whole apparatus of palinodes ; and the 
author, who had posed as the champion of the Church, 
now turns his thunders against " the nurse of all 
that is vile " ; while the French, who in the original 
poem had figured as savages and infidels, are now 
hailed as the apostles of liberty and reason. From 
this sorry shuffling it is almost a relief to turn to 
U Bar do della Selva Neva (1806), a fulsome epic in 
praise of " Napoleon the great," and in violent dis- 
praise of his enemies ; the " craven " Mack — the 
main theme of the poem is the Capitulation of 
Ulm, — the "perfidious king -minister" Pitt, and the 
" truculent hero " Nelson. This time the " chameleon 
poet" wrote in blank verse, with slight obliga- 
tions to Ossian, and others of more significance 
to Gray. But for the most part the epic is 
furnished forth from the frippery of the classical 
wardrobe ; and by far the best thing in it is a 
faithful version of Napoleon's famous indictment of 
the Directory. 

The best work of Monti, however, was achieved in 
the drama, and belongs to the time before the political 



448 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

storm had swept him from his moorings. The most 
characteristic of his tragedies is Aristodemo, 

Aristoderno. . 

which was first performed at Eome (1787) 
in the presence of Goethe. It was avowedly written in 
rivalry with the tragedies of Alfieri. But the contrast 
is far more striking than the resemblance. This ap- 
pears in the easy, perhaps monotonous, flow of the 
verse. It appears still more in the romantic touches 
which are scattered throughout the play, and which 
are by no means always in harmony with the classical 
setting. That the hero should take his own life in 
remorse for a crime, if crime it were, committed 
many years earlier, is not only, as Goethe remarked 
at the time, an incident which no Italian audience 
was likely to comprehend, but one at which even 
the most sensitive of modern consciences is liable 
to be staggered, and which the robust conscience 
of the ancients would have found altogether absurd. 
And this is the central motive of the tragedy. 
Monti, doubtless by way of paying his court, would 
have had Goethe believe that the incident was 
prompted by Werther. 1 It is, indeed, nothing if 
not romantic. The same may be said of the super- 
natural terrors in which the play abounds; in par- 
ticular, of the scene before the tomb of Dirce, which 
constitutes the fourth act, and is clearly suggested 
by Stmiramis, It is, in short, among the earliest, if 
not the earliest, of romantic tragedies that Aristodemo 
takes rank in the history of Italian literature. 

The events of 1796 and the following years awak- 

1 See Italienische Reise ; Goethe, Werlie^ xix. 140-42, 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 449 

ened in the Italians for the first time the sense that 
g. Pindemonte : they were a nation. And it was a sign 
jacobin dramas. full of prom i se f or the future that, as in 

France, this feeling at once found voice in the drama. 
The worn-out plots were replaced by themes of living 
interest. The rigid mould of the classical drama was 
violently broken up. The Caio Gracco of Monti 
(1800), in which benevolent critics have traced the 
influence of Shakespeare's historical plays, is, in 
some faint degree, an instance of this. A more 
pronounced, if cruder, example is to be found in 
the tragedies of Giovanni Pindemonte. The earliest 
of these — though the author, under the name of 
his valet, had already put romantic dramas, Ginevra 
di Scozia (1795) and others, upon the stage — is Orso 
Ijpato (1797). The scene is laid among the lagoons. 
The plot turns upon the successful resistance of 
Eivo Alto, the future Venice, to the usurpations 
of the tyrant of Eraclea. Written in the very 
year of Campo Formio, the play is one long 
appeal to the glorious past of "the eldest child of 
liberty." And it must have been a bitter awakening 
when the man, who came as sworn foe to the tyranny 
of the oligarchy, ended by handing over Venice to 
the fetters of Austria. Apart from the lively interest 
of the matter, Orso has many other features of the 
romantic drama. The frequency of the stage direc- 
tions, the elaboration of the scenery — a palace, a 
piazza, a church, a garden, the lagoons, — above all, 
the violence of the action — the last act positively 
reeks with corpses, — all point this way : they are 

2 f 



450 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

qualities which reappear in the romantic drama of 
France. In Adelina e Roberto the author appeals 
still more directly to the passions of the hour, and 
plunges still more violently into romantic methods. 
Once again, his subject is the struggle for national 
independence — this time, of the United Provinces 
against Spain. But this theme is interlaced, as was 
natural enough, with the atrocities of the Inquisition ; 
and the play ends in a general slaughter of "the 
tyrants, the impostors and the ribalds"; that is, of 
the inquisitors and the Spaniards. It may further 
be noted that the unity of place, which in the 
previous play had been observed at least according 
to the letter, is here rudely cast aside; and the 
scene shifts from a cottage on the banks of the 
Meuse to the dungeon of the heretic, to the council- 
room of the Holy Office, to the chamber of torture, 
and finally to the scaffold by the seashore, with a 
boldness which leaves nothing to be desired. Nor 
is it without significance that in this play, as in 
the Gh*acco of Monti, the influence of Joseph Chenier 
is clearly to be detected. 

The first work, however, in which the passions 
and resentments of these years found direct ex- 
Foscoio: pression — and it is also the first, and 

Jacopoortis. j n( j ee( j the only, work which sweeps us 
into the full tide of romance — is Le Ultime Lettere 
di Jacopo Ortis, by Foscolo (1776-1827). Written 
under the bitter disillusionment which followed the 
betrayal of Campo Formio, it was not published 
—and even then in the face of great difficulties 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 451 

— till 1802. 1 In form and subject, notwithstanding 
the author's efforts to deny it, it is clearly modelled 
upon JVerther, and, like Werther, it ends in suicide. 
But the character of the hero has a far deeper strain 
of passion than his German original. And the style 
throughout is more trenchant ; as some critics prefer 
to say, more emphatic. Without pressing a vain dis- 
pute of words, it may fairly be said that there is 
nothing in the style which is not in complete accord- 
ance with the given character of the hero, and that 
Foscolo would have known his business uncommonly 
ill if he had made his Italian a mere echo of 
Goethe's German. The truth is that the political 
setting and the vehemence of the principal character 
unite to put an entirely new face upon the old theme ; 
and that with all its debts to Goethe and, in a far less 
degree, to Gray, Ortis remains a work of striking 
originality. The denunciation of the wrongs of Italy 
and of society at large is strangely impressive ; and in 
the more idyllic scenes, which are laid among the 
Euganean hills, there is wonderful charm. The high 
promise of this romance was hardly to be borne out 
by the subsequent works of the author. In his 
dramas he halts uneasily between the two opinions, 
classical and romantic; at one moment a disciple of 
Alfieri, at the next an ardent devotee of the new 
model. And 1 Sepolcri is rather the work of a great 
patriot than of a poet. As a patriot, indeed, he is one 
of the few men who stood the test of that time of 

1 This was the first authentic edition. Garbled versions had ap- 
peared in 1799 and the intervening years. 



452 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

trial, 1 and he is justly revered as the prophet of 
Italian unity and independence. After an ill-starred 
attempt to raise Venice against Austria in 1814, he 
was driven into exile. And his closing years were 
devoted to studies of Petrarch, Boccaccio and 
Dante. For our purpose, however, he lives as the 
one author who, alike in thought and style, was 
heart and soul a romantic ; a disciple of the earlier 
Goethe, a precursor of George Sand and the men 
of 1830. 

Thus far the history of Eomance in Italy. Its 
fruits, so far as our period is concerned, are rather in 
promise than performance. It was reserved for the 
next generation to complete the work of which we 
have here sketched the beginning. The Carmagnola 
of Manzoni was published in 1820, Adelchi in 1822, 
IPromessi Sposi in 1827. And the poems of Leopardi, 
which, " classical " as they may be in form, are steeped 
through and through with the romantic spirit, belong 
to the same years. 

The most commanding figure of the period, how- 
ever, is yet behind — Alfieri (1749-1803). His 
character is at least as striking as his 
literary work. Imperious, fiery, a rebel 
by nature, he was probably more framed for a life 
of action than for one of thought and imagination, 
and, like Byron, he never ceased to reckon the 
latter infinitely beneath the former. But in Italy, 
as it then was, all avenues to action were cut off, 

1 On this account he was bitterly assailed by Monti and other 
weathercocks. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 453 

at least for one to whom the courtier's arts were 
odious and contemptible. And, after some years of 
rather aimless wandering and passionate quest of love, 
Alfieri threw himself, with the abruptness which 
marked all his resolves, into the life of study and 
imagination, sustained by a devotion, in which he 
never afterwards wavered, to the Countess of Albany, 
wife of the Young Pretender. This was in 1775-77. 
And for the next dozen years he poured out an un- 
broken stream of tragedies which, to the number of 
nineteen, were finally collected and published in 1789. 1 
The labour involved in the composition of these plays 
was untold. For the author was forced to begin by 
mastering the literature of his own land, and learning 
the very language in which he was to write, his 
earliest plays having been first actually written in 
French prose. But he threw himself into the task 
with the same ardour which had hitherto made him 
one of the most reckless riders and duellists of his 
day. And if the earlier plays may be charged with 
torturing the language — and the inversions are doubt- 
less often extremely harsh, — this defect would seem 
to have been at least greatly softened as time went 
on. It is far less noticeable in Saul and Mirra than 
in Filippo or Polinice. And it is closely bound up 
with his just hatred of the effeminacy and " nerveless- 
ness " into which the language of Italian poetry, and 
above all of Italian tragedy, had sunk, and which he 
was never weary of contrasting with the energy and 

1 The first ten had already appeared, in two instalments, in 
1783. 



454 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

" ferocity " of the speech of Dante. If we compare 
his harshness with the " languor and triviality " even 
of the best of his contemporaries — of Monti, for in- 
stance, or Giovanni Pindemonte, — we shall feel that 
much is to be forgiven to him. 

As to matter, his tragedies, at fcheir best, stand 

in no need of such allowance. Working within 

the strict bounds of the classical drama, 

His genius 

in classical and adhering rigorously to the unity of 
time though not always that of place, he 
fulfils the classical ideal more completely than any 
other modern writer. He shows not merely a splen- 
did mastery of action and situation, but also a grip 
of character which might well have been thought 
beyond the reach of his limited resources. The force 
of classical tragedy, it may fairly be said, depends first 
and foremost upon the choice of a situation which 
shall bring the personages of the drama into instant 
conflict. Herein lies the supreme power of the Greek 
dramatists, and of Eacine among the moderns. And 
in this faculty Alfieri must surely be reckoned to rival, 
if not to surpass, Eacine himself. Now this concen- 
tration upon the situation undoubtedly tends to ex- 
clude any such development of the characters as is 
found in the romantic drama. This was explicitly re- 
cognised by Aristotle in his analysis of Greek tragedy : 
it is borne out by the practice of the Greek dramatists. 
Of later dramatists according to the classical type, 
Eacine alone had, to some extent, succeeded in over- 
coming the difficulty. And even Eacine must yield 
the palm to Alfieri. The types of character the latter 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 455 

loves to select are so marked, the passions by which 
they are moved so strong, that every turn of the action 
presents them in a new light, and throws them into 
more and more prominent relief. It would be difficult 
to name any dramatist in whom the action is so serried, 
or the shock and counter-shock of the characters so 
rapid and so intense. This is marked in the extraor- 
dinary compression of the plot and the extremely small 
number of the personages. The latter rarely exceed 
five, and are not seldom as few as four, while in length 
these plays hardly ever reach 1500 lines, and often fall 
short of this limit very far ; a result on which it is 
clear that the author prided himself not a little, apply- 
ing the knife ruthlessly at each fresh revision and 
complacently recording the final number to which he 
reduced himself in several passages of his Life. Thus, 
by eschewing all ornament, by rigorously cutting away 
all save the bone and muscle of dramatic action, he was 
able to give to the classical form something of the life 
and fulness of Eomance. 

It remains true that, with certain reservations to 
be mentioned directly, the classical strain prevails 
Greek and his- decisively over the rest. The greatest 
toricai subjects, triumphs of the poet are won, for the 
most part, in themes already treated by his Greek 
forerunners. And when he turns, as he does in 
two of his finest pieces (Filippo and Don Garcia), 
to themes which may fairly be counted of roman- 
tic import, the method, as opposed to the matter, 
is just as classical as in those which he drew 
from the repertory of Athens. In truth, it can- 



456 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

not be said that there is anything in the classical 
model which, of necessity, bars out presentment of 
character. The mere limits of space, no doubt, not 
to mention the further restrictions involved in the 
" unities " (particularly that of time), make it impos- 
sible that the classical drama should ever vie with the 
romantic in this respect. But Agamemnon, Antigone, 
and CEdipus Bex are in themselves sufficient proof that 
the difference is one of degree rather than of kind. 
The real danger lies in the opening which the classical 
type gives to rhetorical declamation, and this danger 
only the greatest genius, and in its happiest moments, 
is able to surmount. And it is because he set his face 
against this temptation from the outset that Alfieri, in 
his treatment of character no less than in the outward 
machinery of his plays, may claim to have reverted to 
the purest form of classical tragedy, and to be the 
opponent only of the spurious imitation ; or rather, to 
have reached the point at which, in principle, the 
classical and the romantic dramas are at one. 

The strange thing is that, when he wrote his 
tragedies, Alfieri was altogether ignorant of Greek, 
and does not even seem, as a general rule, to have 
consulted translations. This was not, perhaps, entirely 
a disadvantage. It enabled him to treat the well-worn 
themes with such freedom that they became a new 
creation in his hands. A glance at Polinice, or Anti- 
gone, or Oreste will suffice to establish this. The one 
ancient dramatist within his reach was Seneca ; and, 
except in the sententious style which he sometimes 
adopts, and with conspicuous success, it cannot be 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 457 

said that Seneca had any influence upon his mind. 1 
The rhetoric, the fustian, and the melodrama of the 
Eoman were not only foreign but hateful to his genius. 
This appears even in his weaker plays ; in those, that 
is, where the subject, the praise of liberty, is more 
abstract, and therefore lends itself more readily to 
rhetorical treatment. It cannot be said that such 
plays — Virginia, Bruto, Timoleone, Agide — are at all 
equal to the more dramatic pieces. But at least mere 
rhetoric is avoided. 

So far we have spoken of those tragedies, and 

they are the great majority, which are decisively 

classical in tone. There are others, how- 

Romantic 

elements in ever, which, though still classical in form, 
approach in spirit more closely to the 
romantic order. The most notable of these are 
Saul and Mirra, both composed comparatively late 
(1782-85). Here the author is content to dispense 
with action and to paint mood or character directly, 
without the aid of any such medium. Many have 
held that his powers are here seen at their highest ; 
and it is recorded that Byron was overcome, even to 
convulsions, at the representation of Mirra. There 
can be no doubt that Alfieri, both here and in the last 
act of Maria Stuarda, reveals a lyric quality, alike in 
spirit and expression, which could never have been 
inferred from his more classical pieces. Yet it is hard 

1 " La lettura di Seneca m'infiammo e sforzo d'ideare ad un parte- 
le due gemelle tragedie, V Agamennone e I'Oreste. Non mi pare con 
tutto cio ch'elle mi siano riuscite in nulla un furto fatto da Seneca." 
Vita, ep. iv. cap. 2. 



458 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

not to regret the distinctively dramatic genius, so strong 
in his earlier tragedies, but here deliberately laid aside. 

Something of the romantic instinct may be recog- 
nised in this departure from the strictly classical 
type. The same instinct, under another and more 
disputable shape, had appeared in the classical 
tragedies themselves. If it be an essential quality 
of the classical spirit that the artist stands aloof from 
his work and does not allow his own passions and 
convictions to enter into it, then Alfieri can never be 
said to have complied with the classical conditions. 
Far from it. In most of his plays the personal con- 
victions of the man, in particular his " fierce and 
furious hatred of all forms of tyranny," force them- 
selves to the surface, and may almost be called the 
ruling inspiration of the whole. This, doubtless, re- 
duces the weaker samples — Virginia, for instance, 
and La Congiura de' Pazzi — to the level of an 
academical exercise. But, in happier moments, it 
serves to sharpen the poet's dramatic instinct; it 
quickens him to draw the utmost that can be drawn 
from characters with whom, either by attraction or 
repulsion, he is thoroughly in accord. And it gives 
a fire and fury to his portraiture which more dis- 
passionate methods could hardly have attained. 

Yet, with all these abatements, the general effect 

of his dramas remains decisively classical. And the 

subordiTMte to romantic critics of the next generation were 

the classical. j us tified in fixing a great gulf between his 

aims and theirs. 1 They may have laid too great a 

1 See a striking essay by Mazzini, Del Drarnma Storico (1830). 
Opere, ii. 198-272. 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 459 

stress on the mere accessories of that difference ; upon 
the lack of "local colouring " and historical setting. 
But behind these externals there lies the crucial dis- 
tinction that while the romantic drama, when true to 
itself, attempts to paint human character as moulded 
by the outward circumstances and accidents of life, the 
classical dramatists, and among them Alfieri, work by 
a rigid process of selection. They confine themselves 
to the circumstances which are part and parcel of the 
situation taken for the theme of the dramatic story. 
They set themselves to render only the inmost and 
most essential qualities of the soul. Their method is 
more severe, more concentrated, more abstract, than 
that of romance. And this severity of method is the 
first thing to strike us in Alfieri. His stage is a purely 
ideal stage, with nothing to mark that it is built in 
one place rather than another. His characters are 
purely ideal characters; stripped not merely of the 
costume which belongs to this or that particular age, 
but of the very clothing which, from long custom, we 
have come to regard as man's second nature ; spiritual 
gladiators, who descend into the lists, prepared to 
smite down all who venture to cross the path of their 
passionate wickedness or no less passionate virtue. 
Of all classical dramatists he is the most unflinching ; 
perhaps, also, the most typical. 

It is by his tragedies that Alfieri lives. Tragedy, 

however, was far from being the only field of his 

energies. Translations, critical theories, 

His Comedies. . 

lyrics, sonnets, satires — the best known 
of which is U Misogallo (1792-99), a furious diatribe 
against the " tiger - apes " of the Eevolution, in 



460 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

mingled prose and verse — flowed in abundance from 
his pen. But the only writings, not tragical, on 
which it is necessary to dwell are the comedies and 
the autobiography, both of which belong to his clos- 
ing years (1800-3). The former are by no means 
so well known as they deserve to be; the fame 
of the tragedies has probably stood in their light. 
One only — E Divorzio, a lively satire on the Cicisbeo 
and other matrimonial institutions of Italy — deals with 
the ordinary themes of comedy. Another, La Fines- 
trina y is a piece of pure fantasy. The remaining four 
— they are rather, as the author says, "one divided 
into four," I! Uno, I Pochi, I Troppi, UAntidoto — are 
in the nature of political satire. And it is clear that 
Aristophanes, whose Frogs had been among the trans- 
lations of the preceding years, was the model that the 
author had before his eyes. The themes of the first 
three are taken from classical story. Monarchy is 
ridiculed in the tale of Darius, his horse and his 
handy groom; aristocracy in a merciless burlesque 
of the Gracchi, Cornelia with the worst grace in the 
world receiving a morning call from an upstart heroine 
of finance, while Tiberius rehearses an oration before 
a looking-glass, to the accompaniment of a flute. 
Democracy is blasted in an equally contemptuous 
travesty of Demosthenes at the court of Alexander 
in Babylon. The concluding piece, the least success- 
ful of the four, shifts the scene from classical ground 
to a nameless island in the Orkneys ; and the treat- 
ment is no less fanciful than the setting. It is only 
with the moral that we return to solid earth; and 



FRANCE AND ITALY. 461 

the plunge is abrupt. The "antidote" to the three 
"poisons" is found in constitutional monarchy, so 
artfully tempered as to neutralise all their deadly 
qualities and, by a stroke of the wand, convert them 
into blessings. The allegory is uncommonly clumsy ; 
and Alfieri is more at home in his classical burlesques. 
Whether it is legitimate to lay profane hands on 
memories so stately, is another question. But that 
once granted, the skill, the striking originality of the 
writer, can hardly be denied. And his own defence of 
his method is ingenious enough. " My century," he 
writes, " had set itself to fish tragedy out of comedy. 
... I struck into just the opposite path and sought 
to draw comedy out of tragedy ; a task which appears 
to me more useful, more amusing, and more sound. 
For the great often make us laugh ; while no bourgeois 
— banker, lawyer, or the like — ever excited our admir- 
ation. And the buskin fits ill upon a dirty foot." 1 A 
characteristic hit at those beneath him in rank ; an 
equally characteristic assertion of classical principles 
against the most cherished invention of the earlier 
phases of romance. 

The autobiography is a more unquestioned achieve- 
ment. The portraiture, both direct and indirect, is 
His auto- one °f the most striking upon record. The 
biography. se t picture is drawn with the fewest and 
the boldest strokes. And, unconsciously, the char- 
acter of the poet reveals itself on every page in 
vivid phrases of scorn or admiration for the actions, 
of graphic description for the scenes, among which 

1 Vita, Ep. iv., cap. 29. 



462 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

his lot was cast. Nothing could be more stirring 
than the story of his duel with Lord Ligonier in 
Green Park ; or his escape from Paris, after the 
10th of August, with the Countess of Albany. Apart 
from such incisive portrayal of character and incident, 
the chief value of the Vita lies in the luminous account 
which it gives of the manner of his working, — an 
account more minute, though from the nature of the 
case less exciting, than Cellini's description of the 
casting of Perseus; as, indeed, in more ways than one 
the life of the poet recalls that of the boisterous 
sculptor. And it is a significant tribute to the 
prevalent tendencies of his age that the supreme 
champion of classical ideals should, in the last work 
of his life, have followed in the steps of Eousseau, 
the father of romance. 

Consult the following, among other works : Petit de Julleville, 
Eistoire de la Langue et de la Litterature francaise (8 vols., 1896-99) ; 
Hettner, Litter aturgeschichte (as before) ; Grimm, Correspondance 
litteraire (17 vols., 1813-14) ; Brandes, Hovedstromningr (as before) ; 
Chateaubriand, Memoires a" Outre-tombe (12 vols., 1849-50); Madame 
de Stael, Dix Annees d'Fxil (1818) ; Sainte-Beuve, Causeries du 
Lundi (15 vols., v.d.), Portraits de Femmes, Portraits litteraires 
(3 vols.); Brunetiere, Etudes critiques (6 vols., v.d.); Beclard, 
Scbastien Mercier (vol. i., 1903) ; Texte, /.-/. Rousseau et les Origines 
du Cosmopolitisme litteraire (1895); Jusserand, Shakespeare en 
France (1898) ; Morse Stephens, Orators of the French Revolution 
(2 vols., 1892) ; Storia Letteraria a" Italia, scritta da una Societa di 
Professori (7 vols., 1900-6) ; Sismondi, De la Litterature du Midi 
de V Europe (4 vols., 1813); Bouterwek, Oeschichte der Poesie und 
Beredsarakeit seit dem Fnde des lo en Jahrhunderts (vol. iii. — English 
translation, 2 vols., 1823) ; Alfieri, Vita, scritta da esso (1804) ; 
Biographie Universelle (85 vols., 1811-62) ; Nouvelle Biographie 
Generate (46 vols., 1853-66). 



463 



CHAPTEE IV. 

OTHER COUNTRIES. 

SPAIN I CLASSICAL TRADITION, AND REVOLT AGAINST IT — SENTIMENTAL 
COMEDY — TRAGEDY — LA HUERTA — PORTUGAL — GREECE — HUNGARY 
— NETHERLANDS — CLASSICISM : BILDERDIJK — ROMANCE I FEITH — 
E. WOLFF AND A. DEKEN — DENMARK AND NORWAY — BAGGESEN : 
PREVALENTLY CLASSICAL — ROMANCE : WESSEL, EWALD — OEHLEN- 
SCHLAGER — SWEDEN — SLAV COUNTRIES — POLAND — FRENCH INFLU- 
ENCE — NATIONALISM : IN POLITICS — IN LITERATURE — BOHEMIA — 
JOSEPH II. — NATIONAL REVIVAL — RUSSIA — CATHERINE H. — PER- 
SECUTION OF NOVIKOV — DRAMA: COMEDY — TRAGEDY — NOVEL — 
CONCLUSION. 

With Italy all that is vital in the literature of the 
period may be said to end. In dealing with the 
remaining countries no more is possible, nor perhaps 
desirable, than to indicate the main currents of 
thought and feeling, the general drift of literary 
activity, in each. We turn first to the two Latin 
countries which still stand over — to Spain and 
Portugal. 

In Spain, as elsewhere, the interest of the period 
spam: dassuai centres round the revolt, timid indeed but 
tradition, and yet clearly perceptible, against the classical 

revolt against it. ... . _. . . . n ■,»•", 

tradition. During the first half of the 
eighteenth century that tradition had tightened its 



464 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

hold upon the land of Lope and Calderon. A French 
dynasty was on the throne ; and this must have 
strengthened the tendency, so pronounced through- 
out Europe, to bow down before the ideals em- 
bodied in the "great age" of French literature. 
In lyric poetry, no doubt, the national tradition 
still lingered ; and the old national forms — Quin- 
tillas, Letrillas, and the rest — were again brought 
into use by Nicolas Moratin and others after the 
middle of the century. But the life has gone out 
of them — here, as wherever the classical spirit pre- 
vailed, things being unpropitious to lyric inspiration. 
Nor can it be said that, even in the last quarter of 
the century, the outlook greatly brightened; though 
the lyrics of Melendez Valdes (1754-1817), of which 
the first volume was published in 1785, are generally 
both sincere in feeling and graceful in expression. 1 
Of the novel not even so much can be reported. 
The revival of this form had in other countries been 
among the chief signs of the romantic movement. 
Alike in England, France, and Germany, the publica- 
tion of a novel — Clarissa, La Nouvelle Htloise, Werther 
— had marked some of the most memorable dates in the 
earlier phases of romance. The same thing, though 
at a much later period, is true of Italy. But in 
Spain, which in the preceding century had created 
a new type in this matter — a type whose influence, 
as we have seen, was still potent even upon Goethe, — 

1 E.g., Al Viento, La Noche de Invierno, La Tarde, and, in a 
different vein, A las EstreUas. All these show the influence of 
Thomson. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 465 

invention seems to have run dry. During the whole 
of our period, as well as that which preceded it, not 
a single novel of note was produced. Perhaps the 
most memorable work, apart from the drama, achieved 
during this period was the revival of the fable. This 
is bound up with the name of Iriarte (1750-1791), 
whose Fabulas Literarias were published in 1782. It 
was round the drama, however, that the main battle 
of the period was waged. It was here that the power 
of France, of the classical tyranny, was most strongly 
entrenched. It was here that the sharpest efforts 
were made to dislodge it. By the middle of the 
century the triumph of the classical drama was 
tolerably complete. Classical tragedies were com- 
posed in abundance; 1 the old national drama, the 
brilliant creation of Lope and Calderon, had fallen 
into discredit; the still more characteristic Autos 
Sacramentales had been prohibited. 2 But the natural 
instincts of the Spaniard were too strong to allow 
such usurpation to pass unchallenged. And the line 
of attack, as might have been predicted, was twofold. 
On the one hand, weapons of offence were drawn 
from the armoury of France herself. Tragedy, as 
conceived by Corneille or Bacine, gave way before 

1 The earliest of these seems to have been the Cinna of San Juan 
(1713) ; and the Virginia of Montiano (1750) may be said to mark the 
classical triumph. Even Canizares (1676-1760), the last of the old 
race of dramatists, bowed to the classical fashion in Iphigenia and 
other tragedies. The tragedies of Cienfuegos (1764-1809), e.g., Zoraida, 
are perhaps the most consistently classical produced in our period. 

2 In 1764, at the instigation of the Archbishop of Toledo. See La 
Huerta, La Escena Hespanola Defendida i p. 43 (ed. Madrid, 1786). 

2 G 



466 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

the sentimental drama of Diderot and Sedaine. On 
the other hand, the whole theory of classical tragedy- 
was violently assailed, the superiority of the national 
theatre vigorously asserted. 1 This, no doubt, was 
rather a matter of theory than of practice ; an affair 
of the critics rather than the playwrights. But the 
revulsion of feeling made itself felt even upon the 
stage. And, however much the classical form might 
be retained, there was a marked tendency to adopt 
themes drawn from the national history and handled, 
so far as possible, in the national spirit. In the 
former line of assault, the leading figure was Jovel- 
lanos. In the latter, the heat of the day was borne 
by La Huerta ; though here too Jovellanos, and with 
him the elder Moratin, did conspicuous service. 

Jovellanos (1744-1811), who was honourably dis- 
tinguished in public life as well as in literature, 
sentimental was, when it so pleased him, a sentiment- 
comedy. a.list of the first water. And of all "comedies 
larmoyantes," M Delincuente Honrado (1774), his one 
effort in that direction, is the most effusive. The plot, 
like that of Le Philosophe sans le savoir, turns upon 
a duel ; and, by an ingenious aggravation of circum- 
stances, the virtuous criminal has married the wife 
of the man he had slain, and is condemned to death 
by his own father. Neither wife nor father, it need 
hardly be said, is aware of the criminal's identity until 
their action is irrevocable ; and the discovery plunges 
both into despair. A pardon, however, arrives as the 

1 We may further notice the sparkling burlesques (Sainetes) of 
Ramon de la Cruz (1731-1798 ?), e.g., Manolo. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 467 

victim mounts the scaffold ; and the piece ends in 
embraces and tears of joy. Both sentiment and 
incidents are likely to strike the modern reader as 
rather cheap ; and by far the best thing in the play 
is the ingenuous selfishness of the wife's father. But 
the importance of such works often lies quite apart 
from their intrinsic merits. And this play, like so 
many others of our period, is significant as a protest 
— a protest, in this instance, against the attempt to 
force the intellectual regularities of French tragedy 
upon the more fantastic and emotional imagination 
of the Spaniard. 

Hardly less marked is the work of Jovellanos and 
his associates in the field of tragedy itself. The French 
model, no doubt, is taken as the framework. 
And Jovellanos goes so far as to accept 
Horace's precept, "Vos exemplaria Graeca," with 
the substitution of " French " for " Greek." But, 
here again, he turns the weapons of the French 
against themselves, and appeals to the example of 
De Belloy to justify the adoption of a theme drawn 
from the history of his own nation. The theme in 
question is Pelayo (written 1769, published 1773), 
a romantic incident taken from the life of the 
great patriot. The intention, it must be confessed, 
is better than the performance. For the play is 
frigid. And not even the romantic accessories of 
the last act — a single combat, " coram populo," 
between Pelayo and his Moorish adversary, and the 
treacherous murder of the latter in the course of 
the duel — are able to give it warmth. The same 



468 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

subject, under another name (Horviesinda), was taken 
almost at the same time (1770) by the elder Moratin 
(1737-1780). But he throws himself into it with 
far greater zest ; he approaches more nearly to the 
form and methods of the national drama; and his 
appeal to the national feeling is far more stirring 
and direct. 1 All this is the more remarkable when 
we consider that, in the rest of his works, the author 
stood as the avowed champion of French ideals ; and 
that his other tragedy, Lucrecia, is impeccably class- 
ical, both in method and effect. 

With La Huerta (1734-1787) we come into much 

closer quarters with the spirit of revolt. This is 

doubtless more true of his critical than 

La Huerta. . 

his creative work. Baguel (1778), the 
one important sample of the latter, has commonly 
been reckoned among the classical tragedies of 
the time. It is written in blank verse, and the 
unities are observed with pedantic rigour. On the 
other hand, its subject is drawn from the history 
of mediaeval Castille, and it is full both of Spanish 
sentiment and romantic passion. The theme, the 
infatuation of the Christian monarch for a beauti- 
ful Jewess, 2 recalls that of Lust's Dominion or Titus 

1 It is written in iambics with irregular rhymes, as against the 
blank verse of Pelayo. The head of the Moorish prince is paraded 
in triumph on a pike, an incident which recalls certain crudities of 
La Cisma de Inglaterra or El Medico de su Hour a. And the lyric 
element is represented by a chorus, which appears, however, only at 
the close. 

2 The subject had been taken by more than one earlier poet — e.g., 
Ulloa y Pereira, in the reign of Philip IV. See Quintana, Tesoro del 
Parnaso Espanol, p. 375. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 469 

Andronicus. And it is hard to believe that the 
lament of Alfonso over the lot of kings was not 
inspired by Shakespeare. 1 Violent though it is, 
Raquel is the most striking, as it is on the whole 
the most romantic, of the tragedies produced during 
this period. And it prepares us for the whole- 
hearted defence of the national drama with which 
the life of the author was to close. This consisted 
in a collection of national plays, rather curiously 
omitting those of Lope de Vega, published in 1785, 
and accompanied by a preface in which the author 
stands forth as champion of the Spanish drama 
against the. world. He had been stung to the quick 
by the assaults of Voltaire and others upon his 
favourite writers. And he at once proceeds to carry 
the war into the quarters of the enemy; to accuse 
Voltaire of "ineptitude, dishonest manoeuvres, and 
gross ignorance " in his arguments, of " improbability, 
prolixity, and irrelevance" in his own most famous 
performances. 2 The cry raised by the Frenchman 
against the historical inaccuracies of Calderon is a 
" mere triviality M ; which, if it were worth while, 
might be hurled back with at least equal force 
against the writings of Milton, and of the French 

1 Other, and more certain, traces of English influence are to be 
found in Melendez Valdes, Jovellanos, and Escoiquiz. The first had 
fed upon Thomson, and wrote a Caida de Luzbel, clearly suggested by 
Milton. The second translated the first book of Paradise Lost. The 
last, notorious as the dupe of Napoleon, translated both Paradise 
Lost (1814) and Young's Night Thoughts (1797). 

2 La Escena Hespaiiola (ed. 1786), pp. 59, 84, 96-101. Zaire is the 
main object of attack. 



470 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

themselves. 1 It is true that the Spanish drama 
defies those "rigid and purely conventional rules 
which the French observe as though they were re- 
vealed among thunders and lightnings from Par- 
nassus." But its finest examples " have more genius, 
more invention, more charm, in a word higher 
poetry, than all the correct productions of the 
foreigner." 2 And, whereas the editor of the Thi&tre 
Frangais has asserted that "Kacine has more genius 
than all the Spanish dramatists put together," La 
Huerta is disposed to agree with those Spanish 
critics who had claimed for Oalderon a superiority 
over "the united forces of the French, the Italians, 
and the English." 3 It could have been wished that 
the "defence" had gone more closely into partic- 
ulars. But enough is said to show the lie of the 
ground, and to remind us that the revolt against 
classical canons, which had disturbed the last days 
of Voltaire, found a resounding echo in the one land 
which could boast of a drama absolutely indigenous 
and spontaneous in its growth. The cause which La 
Huerta pleads in the preface was greatly strengthened 
by the main body of his book. And the same work 
was carried forward by the younger Moratin (1760- 
1828), whose labours on the origins of the Spanish 
drama, a performance of great value, were not, how- 
ever, published till long after his death (1850). The 
son, like the father, was torn in two directions ; and 
the bulk of his life was devoted to the translation 

1 La Escena Hcspanola, pp. 107-110. 

2 lb., pp. 147, 148. * lb., pp. 140, 141. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 471 

of French masterpieces and the pursuit of classical 
ideals. The stormy and disastrous reign of Charles 
IV. (1788-1808) was not favourable to literature. 
Spain, whether at war with the Eevolution or dragged 
at the chariot-wheels of Napoleon, had other things 
to think of. And, with La Huerta, we must leave 
her literature for that of Portugal. 

The literary activity of Portugal during this period 
was considerably less than that of Spain. There were 
the regulation epics, Lisboa Beedificada (by 
Eamalho, 1784), and others; a burlesque 
epic, Gaticanea (by Carvalho, 1781); and a classical 
tragedy, which was hailed as a marvel on its first 
appearance, but is, in fact, of the dreariest regularity — 
Osmia, by Cattarina de Sousa (1788). More original 
is a collection of ironical sonnets and satirical sketches 
— the latter in Quintillas and other national metres 
— by Tolentino de Almeida (1801), who may be re- 
garded as a faint anticipation of Beranger. But the 
most distinctive work of the period was perhaps that 
done by Correa Garcao, who, together with Pindaric 
and Horatian odes, produced two comedies — Theatro 
Novo and Assembled — the one on a literary, the other 
on a social theme, and both distinguished by lively 
dialogue and pointed presentment of the subject. 
The former is, for our purposes, the more significant 
of the two. It is prompted by bitter indignation 
at the " deep sea of ignorance " with which the drama 
of Portugal was at this time overwhelmed, and in- 
vokes the great names of the past, Ferreira and 
Miranda, for a return to a better — and, above all, 



472 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

a more national — tradition. In this connection, it 
is worth while to mention an essay, Historia Critica 
do Theatro, by Antonio de Araujo (1779), which con- 
tains an interesting, though somewhat timid, attack 
upon French tragedy, its disposition to sacrifice 
everything either to love or to "bello espirito," and 
its bondage to " the rules," which have " done little 
or nothing" for imaginative art, while they have 
" chilled the fire of creative genius, or imposed 
shackles on its freedom." From these things it is 
clear that, in Portugal as in the sister country, a 
feeling of discontent with classical ideals was fer- 
menting in the more thinking minds. And the 
same thing appears in the translations from more or 
less romantic models in which the period abounds : 
Tdtmaque, Schonaich's Hermann, Gessner's Abel, 
Young's Revenge, Alexander's Feast, and the Odes 
and Elegy of Gray. 

In the Eastern Peninsula, where all life had been 
crushed out by the oppression of the Turk, only the 
faintest signs of approaching dawn are to 
be traced. Yet even here the dry bones 
had begun to stir. In Greece no revival was con- 
ceivable which should not begin with a return to 
the great memories of the past. And it was almost 
inevitable that this should be carried out in the 
first instance with something of pedantry. An 
attempt was made to restore not only the spirit 
but the very language of ancient Greece ; and, had 
this succeeded, an impassable gulf would from the 
first have been fixed between the new literature and 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 473 

all that could give it vitality and value. We should 
have had a succession of Porsons and Gaisfords, but 
nothing more. Coraes, the leading figure in the 
first generation of the revival, has sometimes been 
credited with sharing this delusion. In reality, he 
was fully alive to the claims of the spoken language ; 
and, though his natural bias was towards the ancients, 
he must be regarded as taking a middle course be- 
tween the extremists of either side ; as having, on the 
whole, marked out the path which the literary lan- 
guage of modern Greece was to follow. More than 
that : in the numerous editions of the ancients which 
form the monument of his energy, there is a marked 
leaning, particularly in his earlier years, towards those 
writings which had most deeply affected the develop- 
ment of modern — we may almost say, of romantic — 
literature; the Characters of Theophrastus (1799), the 
romances of Longus (1802) and Heliodorus (1804), the 
Fables of ^Esop (1810), and, it may perhaps be added, 
the Lives of Plutarch (1826). The next generation 
was to see a new birth of the creative spirit. 

Passing from the southern to the western end of the 
Turkish frontier, we come to Hungary. And here the 

signs of a new life are more plainly marked. 

In the middle of the century the French 
influence was dominant, and it was reinforced by a 
strong current of directly Latin influence, which the 
use of Latin for certain official purposes had perhaps 
tended to confirm. Hence, in addition to translations 
of Virgil and Horace, we find classical metres, hexa- 
meters and elegiacs, imported, and Horatian Odes and 



474 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

Epistles freely imitated. At the same time, however, 
there was a marked reaction towards themes drawn 
from the national life, past and present. Horvath 
produced an Epic on John Huniades (1787), Dugonics 
and Gvadanyi wrote romances on Magyar subjects 
— the former, Etelka (1787), the latter, The Village 
Notary (1790-96) and Adventures of Pal Ronto and 
Count Benyowshi. The revival of lyric poetry is dated 
from the appearance of Kisfaludy's Keserg'6 szerelem 
(Unhappy Love) in 1801. 

From the south-east we pass to the extreme north- 
west, to the Teutonic countries on the shores of the 
North Sea and the Baltic. 

In the literature of the Netherlands there is little 

that, for our purpose, it is necessary to record. The 

Dutch either still clung to the classical 

Netherlands. . 

tradition, or had moved from it no farther 
than the sentimental phase of the romantic revival. 
The former tendency is represented by Bilderdijk, the 
most accomplished literary artist of the period ; the 
latter by Feith and by the two friends, Elizabeth 
Wolff and Agatha Deken. 

Bilderdijk (1756-1831) was indefatigable alike in 

translations and original work. Epics, lyrics, dramas, 

classicism: versions, and adaptations flowed freely from 

Bilderdijk. ^jg p en . an( j never so freely as during the 

last twenty years of his life. His lyric poetry is, 
from the nature of the case, less affected by classical 
tradition than the rest of his work. His expression 
is always graceful, sometimes truly poetical. And in 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 475 

some of his pieces — TJitvaart, for instance, in his 
last volume, Naklang (1827) — he strikes a note of 
deep feeling, to which he is otherwise a stranger. 
His unfinished epic, Be Ondergang der eerste Wareld 
(1809), is one of the numerous poems which, from 
the time of Du Bartas onwards, were drawn from 
the Bible. The subject is much the same as Byron's 
Heaven and Earth; but Bilderdijk had neither the 
feeling nor the imagination which enabled Byron 
to give life to so perilous a theme, and his epic 
machinery is against him. In his translations we 
are more directly confronted with his classical bias. 
Two of his plays, Edipus Koning and Be Bood von 
Edipus (1777-89), are versions of Sophocles; much 
of his love -poetry — e.g., Mijne Verlustiging (1788) 
— is adapted from Anacreon and other classical 
writers; his versions of Ce qui plait aux Barnes, 
LHomme des Champs, and the Essay on Man show 
him as an equally faithful disciple of the classical 
renaissance. And it is something of a shock to find 
that he also turned his head to the romantic Ossian 
(Fingal, 1805). On the whole, however, his tastes are 
markedly classical. He considered Shakespeare to be 
" childish " ; and he set his face from the first against 
the influence of the Germans, — that is, of Klopstock 
and the youthful Goethe, with his numerous copyists. 
The apostle of the German cult was Feith (1753- 
1813) ; and the chief oracles he consulted were Klop- 
stock and Miller, the author of a lachrymose 

Romance: Feith. . 

romance — Siegwart — which was one of the 
numerous progeny begotten by Werther. His chief 



476 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

efforts in the former vein are Het Graf (1792) and De 
Ouderdom (1803) ; in the latter, Julia (1783) and Fer- 
dinand en Gonstantia (1785). He also wrote tragedies, 
classical in form, sentimental in spirit, such as Johanna 
Gray (1791) and Ines de Castro (1794), which seem to 
mark the influence of De Belloy and Lemierre, or 
Mucins Cordus (1795), which is plainly indebted to 
Joseph Chenier. All this brought him under the 
lash of Kinker (1764-1845), who joined hands with 
Bilderdijk to burlesque both the novels and ballads 
of Feith in Post van den Helicon (1788-89), and who 
subsequently wrote a series of parodies on Galrielle 
de Vergy and other foreign or native efforts to roman- 
ticise the stage. So far as the novels are concerned, 
the satire was deserved; but the satirists rather 
weakened than strengthened their case by extending 
it to the drama. 

Sentimentalism takes a healthier shape in the joint 
work of Elizabeth Wolff (1737-1804) and Agatha 
E.woiff and Deken (1741-1804). Their chief novel — 
A.Deken. an( j gjj their best work was done in this 
field — is Sara Burgerhart (1782). The plan of the 
book, and much of its spirit, are manifestly drawn 
from Eichardson. But the writers have thoroughly 
succeeded in transplanting their English tree into 
Dutch soil; and the novel presents us with a 
series of native scenes and portraits which remind 
us that we are in the land of Rembrandt and 
Gerard Douw. The claim put in by the title-page 
— " Not a translation " — is abundantly justified ; 
and the reversion to daylight after a long spell 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 477 

of Arcadian moonshine — e.g., Heemskerk's Batavische 
Arcadia (1647) — is significant. The triumph of Sara y 
whose popularity spread far beyond her own country, 
encouraged the authors to further efforts of the same 
kind — WillemLeevend (1784-85) and Cornelia Wildschut 
(1793-96). In later years the two friends fell upon 
troubled times, partly owing to their political faith, 
which drove them to take refuge in France from the 
triumphant Orange party (1788) ; partly owing to the 
loss of all their money by the failure of their banker 
(1798). They returned to their native country, now 
under a " patriot " government, for the close, and died, 
as they had hoped might be granted to them, within 
a few days of each other. 

Denmark l presents a much richer field of literary 
talent, and reflects the successive tendencies of the 
Denmark and period with marked fidelity: rationalism 
Norway. an( j tfie later classicism on the one hand, 
on the other the dawn of the romantic revival. With 
rationalism, as such, we are hardly concerned. How 
widely it prevailed may be seen from the fact that 
Bastholm, perhaps the most extreme member of the 
school, was court chaplain during the greater part 
of the period (1782 onwards). And, as the temper 
of rationalism has never been imaginative, it is the 
more significant that the poetic revival should have 
followed so soon and won its way so quickly. 

1 With Denmark, Norway must be included, the two being united 
under the same crown. Of the writers mentioned in the text, Brun 
and Wessel were Norwegians, the remainder Danes. 



478 EUEOPEAN LITEEATUEE — THE ROMANTIC EEVOLT. 

The tenacity of the classical tradition touches us 
more closely, and is mainly bound up with the fame of 
Ba 99 esen:prev- Baggesen (1764-1826). In his own sphere, 
cdentiy classical. Baggesen was a really great writer ; and it 
would be an injustice to suppose that he is to be de- 
scribed by any one term, however convenient or how- 
ever venerable. But it remains true that he was, on 
the whole, under the influence of the classical spirit, 
and that his poetic master, a master whose teaching 
was never entirely forgotten, was Voltaire. He excels 
in the half-bantering, half-serious vein, so fruitfully 
worked by his French model. 1 In not a few of his 
poems 2 he even attempts the more solemn strain, which 
was deliberately avoided by Voltaire except in his 
avowedly philosophical pieces. It may be doubted, 
however, whether Baggesen is ever entirely successful 
either in this field or in that of the rather thin and 
obvious sentiment to which he sometimes resorted. 
Certainly, he is more at home in the lighter species of 
poetry ; above all, in satire, in discharging airy shafts 
against literary heretics. And it is curious that his 
skill lies largely in the use which he makes of their 
romantic trappings ; in adroitly seizing, as ornaments 
for his own verse, the very things which he ridicules 
in that of his opponents. The best example of this is 
probably his Epistle to Oehlenschlager, Noureddin til 
Aladdin? in which the oriental bazaar of the younger 
poet is ransacked to trick out the half-ironical compli- 

1 E.g., Emma and Orpheus og Eurydice, of his earlier poems, 
Vcerker, t. i. 

2 E.g., Balder s Graad. lb., t. vii., p. 304. 3 lb., t. v., p. 121. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 479 

raents of the elder (1806). Later, Noureddin's hos- 
tility deepened, and found vent in carping reviews 
of Aladdin's romantic dramas. 1 Aladdin, who had 
winced under the friendly irony of the epistle, bitterly 
resented the direct assault of the reviews. In this 
unedifying wrangle, each poet took the other's name 
in vain ; the elder addressing the younger as Schlegel- 
schlager, while the younger retorted by ringing the 
changes on the first syllable of his adversary's sur- 
name. The dispute is mainly important as serving 
to fix the position of Baggesen, whose antipathy to 
romance stiffened perceptibly in the course of it, and 
who ended by assuming the airs of a legislator of 
Parnassus. In this respect also, the analogy with 
Voltaire was destined to hold good. It should be 
added that Baggesen, at any rate in his earlier days, 
was master of excellent prose ; and that his Laby- 
rinthen? or early letters from abroad (1789-91), are 
full of a fire and vividness which he would seem of 
set purpose to have excluded from his poetry. 

In the romantic revival the leading figures are 
Wessel (1742-1785), Ewald (1743-1781), and Oehlen- 
Romance: schlager (1779-1850). The main activity 
wessei, Ewaid. f fae two former falls before our period ; 
that of the last, after its conclusion. Wessel is 
chiefly memorable for his Kjcerlighed uden Stromper 
(1772), — an amusing burlesque on the Zarine of 
Brun and other classical tragedies, which may be 
taken to mark at once the persistence of the classi- 
cal tradition and the first step in the reaction 

1 Vcerker, t. viii., pp. 21-190. 2 lb., t. ii.-iv. 



480 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

against it. The two others were more ambitious. 
Ewald, who throughout was strongly influenced by 
Klopstock, began his serious work with a half 
lyrical drama on the Temptation, Adam og Eva. 
It is, however, in his next effort, Rolf Krage (1770), 
that he first definitely ranges himself with the 
romantic revolt. His subject is drawn from the 
heroic legends of his nation ; his play is written in 
prose which recalls, however imperfectly, the massive 
style of the old sagas. It is true that he makes his 
bow to classical prejudice by strict observance of the 
unities ; it is also true that the piece is unduly laden 
with modern sentiment. But it would be unjust to 
forget that this was the first attempt which any 
country had made to draw upon the golden stores 
of the legendary past ; and that Europe had to wait 
for at least a generation before the attempt was any- 
where renewed. Ewald himself, however, repeated 
the attempt three years later — and this time with 
less questionable success — in his musical tragedy, 
a tolerably complete anticipation of Wagnerian opera, 
Balders Bod. Here, it need hardly be said, prose is 
rejected for verse ; the blank verse, which forms the 
groundwork, having strength as well as melody, and 
some of the lyrics flowing with a truly admirable 
lilt. 1 What is yet more important, the sentiment, 
though it still bears marks of the "age of feeling," 
is far more in harmony with the subject than was 

1 E.g. , the song of the Valkyries, which would seem to have been 
inspired by the fairies' song in Midsummer Night's Dream, "Over 
hill, over dale." 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 481 

the case with the preceding drama. With another 
musical piece, Fiskerne (1778-80), the short and un- 
happy life of the poet came to a close. 

Oehlenschlager is a more striking figure. A 
thorough-paced "romantic," he was the avowed dis- 
ciple of Tieck and the Schlegels; but — 

Oehlenschlager. . , . , . 

thanks, perhaps, in part to his admira- 
tion of Schiller and, still more, of Goethe — he 
bettered the instruction of his masters. In the 
romantic movement of the Continental Teutons he 
is what Coleridge was in England, or Hugo in France. 
From some of the more questionable qualities of his 
German models he cannot claim to have escaped. 
He shares their love of effect, their restless search of 
it in the most diverse quarters. Konunga Sogur, 
the Gospels, the Arabian Nights — all was fish that 
came to his net, These blemishes, however, play 
a far smaller part in the Danish poet than in his 
German masters. And his poetry is, in the main, 
free from the artificiality, the affectation, and the 
vagueness which are the distinguishing marks of 
theirs. Their outlines are blurred, his are clear 
cut ; their melody is exotic, his springs from the 
inmost genius of the language ; their subjects are far- 
fetched ; his, like the golden horn of which he sings 
in one of his earliest pieces, 1 drawn by preference 

1 Contained in his earliest work, Digte (1803). Other poems 
drawn from the same vein, during the years immediately following, 
are Vaulundurs Saga, Baldur hin Gode, a tragedy, and Thors Rejse til 
Jothunhejm, an epic ; all published in Nordiske Digte, together with 
Hakon Jarl, in 1807. Aladdin (1805) is the one work of importance, 
during these years, taken from a different source. 

2 H 



482 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

from the depths of the soil. The last is, perhaps, the 
most striking characteristic of his work. He had the 
genius to see the inexhaustible treasures which lay- 
ready to be quarried in the mine of Norse legend; 
and, in a temper not entirely unworthy of the older 
masters, he fashioned the heroic past to the service 
of the present. The finest examples of this gift — 
both the ballad and the subsequent drama composed 
on Hakon Jarl (1803-7) — show a power of striking 
home to the heart of a dramatic action which is 
rare at all times, and which was utterly unknown to 
Schlegel or Tieck. This is particularly true of the 
ballad, where the dramatic movement of the action 
is echoed by the stirring beat of the rhythm, with an 
instinctive harmony which only a true poet could have 
achieved. The rhythm, moreover, though it recalls 
that of Schiller, has a richer music than Schiller was 
commonly able to attain. The later work of Oehlen- 
schlager lies beyond our limits. It was continued, in 
the most various directions, till close upon his death. 1 

In Sweden the general trend of literary effort was 
much the same as in other countries ; with this differ- 
ence, that the turn of the tide came con- 
siderably later, and that its force was 
much weaker than was elsewhere commonly the case. 
During the first half of our period the classical 
fashion reigned undisputed ; and its chief champion 

1 His Erindringr, the work on which he was engaged at the time 
of his death, contains, among other things, some lively recollections 
of Goethe (1806-9). 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 483 

was the " Opera King," Gustav III., founder of the 
Academy (1786), and himself the author of several 
pieces, inspired by French enlightenment and carried 
out on the most approved models of French taste. 
His first lieutenant in promoting the French cult 
was Kellgren (1751 - 1795), author among other 
things of Atis and Camilla, and editor of the Stock- 
holmspost, the chief organ of encyclopedic and classi- 
cal ideas (founded 1778). It was, as so often, 
from France that the first impulse to revolt against 
French ideals was immediately drawn. And it was 
in the name of Eousseau, whose influence was per- 
haps nowhere so strong as here, that the ideals of 
Voltaire and d'Alembert were gradually overthrown. 
The most notable figures connected with the dawn 
of this revolt are those of Thorild (1759-1808) and 
Lidner (1757-1793). And that of Franzen (1772- 
1847) may perhaps be added. Thorild stands for 
the more abstract side of the reforming movement. 
It was chiefly through his paper, The New Ex- 
aminer (founded 1784), that he made himself felt; 
and, on the whole, he is more of a critic than a 
creative artist. A bitter opponent of the existing 
order both in literature and politics, he ran violently 
athwart the king, whom he lampooned as a " puny 
rhymester"; and, in the reaction which followed his 
adversary's assassination (1792), he was banished as 
an incendiary. He is above all a champion of free- 
dom and a child of nature ; in the latter character, his 
distinguishing mark is a love of war and the martial 
memories of his country, such as might not unnatur- 



484 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

ally spring from Kousseau's doctrines, and was, in 
fact, forced by untoward circumstances upon the 
Jacobins of France. More creative, if less masculine, 
was the talent of Lidner. Like Thorild, he was a 
disciple of Eousseau ; but it is the softer rather than 
the more rugged side of Kousseau's genius, the sym- 
pathy with suffering rather than the " burning hatred 
of oppression/' that his poetry represents. He shows 
also the influence on the one hand of Werther, on the 
other of Klopstock, Young, and even Milton. Yet in 
some of his work — which included dramas in Alexan- 
drines as well as lyrics and half-lyrical, half-narra- 
tive pieces — a sterner note is struck ; for instance, in 
Spastaras Bod and 1783, — the one a glowing record 
of a mother's self-sacrifice, the other a stirring tribute 
to the endurance of Washington and the courage of 
the British garrison at Gibraltar. Franzen, a native 
of Finland, had from nature a more genuinely lyrical 
talent than either Thorild or Lidner, and great hopes 
were based upon his youthful poems (1792-93). But 
he would seem to have been daunted by criticism, and 
the early promise was not fulfilled till many years 
later. The " iron-years," with which the old century 
closed and the new opened, pressed heavily upon his 
sensitive spirit; and in the disasters which overtook 
Sweden under Gustav IV., a general blight appears 
to have fallen upon the intellectual, no less than on 
the practical, energies of the nation. The foundation 
of the Aurora] orbund by Atterbom and others in 1807 
was the first clear sign of literary revival. It was a 
graft from the Eomantic School of Germany. 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 485 

Among the Slavonic nations, with the possible ex- 
ception of Kussia, there are few traces of the new 
spirit which was astir in the more ad- 

Slav countries. . 

vanced of the Teutonic and Latin peoples. 
Such life as there was still flowed in the channels 
of French classicism and enlightenment. The one 
sign of hope lay in that return to the past, that 
loving study of national origins and antiquities, 
which here, as in England and Germany, held in 
it the promise of a freer and more spontaneous life 
to be realised in the future. Nowhere had Latin 
culture been a more alien influence than in these 
countries. Nowhere was it more needful that the 
national consciousness should be awakened. And 
this, from the nature of the case, was in the main 
a task for the antiquarians. 

Of the two great branches of the Slavonic race — 
the Western and the Eastern, under which must be 
reckoned the Balkan communities of the South — we 
begin with the former. And it may be well to take 
Poland first, as that country which, for obvious 
reasons, had been most deeply penetrated by foreign 
influences. 

These influences are twofold, Latin and French ; 

the former contributed by the Jesuits who, from the 

close of the sixteenth century, had held 

Poland. ,,'-■". » i 

the whole education or the country in 
their grip; the latter springing out of the strong 
political bond which, from the same period, had 
existed between Poland and the leading Latin 
nation of the West. The Jesuit influence showed 



486 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

itself chiefly in the rhetorical — not to say, inflated 
— style which had long been a tradition in the 
Order, and which reappears, if one may judge from 
translations, in the writings of some who raised 
the standard of revolt and who had themselves been 
trained by Jesuit masters. It is, however, only fair to 
add that the innovators, without exception, came from 
the schools of the Order ; and that, in later years, they 
spared no pains to break down the cramping system 
under which they had been brought up. And, when 
the Order was abolished in 1773, their moment 
came. The charge of teaching passed to the State ; 
and Poland was the first country in Europe to have 
a Ministry of Education. 

The influence of France falls more directly within 
our province. It had swept everything before it 

French during the reign of August of Saxony. 

influence, j^ was g^ dominant throughout the 
troubled days of Poniatovski (1764-1795). This 
was so in satire and miscellaneous poetry; witness 
the satires of Wegierski (1755-1787) and Trembecki 
(1726-1812), manifestly modelled on those of Vol- 
taire ; or the descriptive poetry of Trembecki, an 
apparent imitation of the Gardens of Delille. The 
same influence appears in the drama of the time. 
The tragedies of Kniaznin (1750-1807) — Themistocles, 
Hector, The Spartan Mother — are avowedly classical. 
The comedies of Zablocki (1754-1821), Superstition 
and others, are framed closely on the model of 
Moliere ; though in some, The Sarmatians for in- 
stance, an attempt is made to interweave figures 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 487 

of more native growth. On the whole, the same 
forces are at work in the writings of Krasicki (1735- 
1801). These are in the last degree miscellaneous. 
They include translations of Plutarch and Lucian, 
an Encyclopaedia of the Sciences (1781-82), a Satire 
called Monachomachia closely modelled upon Le Lutrin 
(1775), an Epic upon the wars against the Turk (1782) 
after the fashion of La Henriade, and a social romance, 
Pan Podstoli (1778-98), which would seem to have 
been his most original creation. 1 He further wrote a 
general history of European Poetry, in which he ap- 
pears as a full-blown legislator of Parnassus. The 
Unities are accepted ; Milton is condemned ; Shake- 
speare is once more the drunken savage, capable of 
brilliant outbursts which " set him above the masters." 
In all these, with the one exception of Pan Podstoli, 
the influence of French classicism and Erench en- 
lightenment is unmistakable. 

A more fruitful form of the French influence 
appears in the disciples of Eousseau, Staszic (1755- 
Nationaiism: 1826) and, in a less degree, Kollataj 
in polite. (1750-1812). Here, however, we are on 
political rather than on literary ground ; and the 
chief importance of these men lies in their strenu- 
ous effort to avert the doom which, from the date 
of the first Partition (1772), threatened the very 
existence of their country. Staszic, who had begun 

1 It may be described as a cross between The Spectator and Sand- 
ford and Merton. The virtuous magistrate discourses on Education, 
serfdom, shebeens, and all the other institutions of Polish life. There 
is a German translation, Herr Untertruchsess. 



488 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

as the ardent follower of Kousseau, in the end 
proclaimed himself ready to sacrifice everything to 
the maintenance of national independence ; and, 
with this object, to strengthen the hands of the 
king against the aristocracy and, generally, against 
the claims of individual liberty. These principles, 
which were manifestly justified by the circum- 
stances, are put forward in two writings, Considera- 
tions on the Life of Zamojshi (1785) and A Warn- 
ing to Poland (1790). They were more or less 
completely embodied in the Constitution of 1791. 
But, unhappily, the intrigues of Catherine were once 
more allowed to prevail. The patriot Ministry, in- 
cluding Kollataj, who had been among the chief 
authors of the Constitution, basely surrendered to 
the aristocratic opposition (July 1792). The dis- 
memberment and the final extinction of Poland 
inevitably followed (1793-95). It is a bitter reflec- 
tion that British money, lavishly granted to our 
allies for other objects, was in fact used for this 
nefarious purpose. 

It is with Naruszewicz (1733-1796) that we first 

come upon the smack of the soil. His poems, which 

belong mainly to his earlier years, are 

In literature. , ...„ . 

full of it, in spirit if not in form — for 
instance, his Ode to the Portraits of the famous 
Poles of old, and that called The Voices of the Dead. 
Still more important is his History of the Polish 
People down to the accession of the House of 
Jagellon at the close of the fourteenth century 
(1774-86). This is significant for its scholarly use 






OTHER COUNTRIES. 489 

of the widely scattered sources ; yet more so, for 
the love of Poland and all things Polish which 
inspired it. It was the earliest appeal to the 
national conscience from the foreign traditions which 
had so long overlaid and stifled it. And, in this 
respect, it may be said to have prepared the way 
for the national revival which was the work of the 
next generation in the field of literature; above all, 
for such romantic reconstructions of the past as are 
to be found in the Pan Tadeusz of Mickiewicz. At 
first sight it may seem strange to attach much weight 
to a mere matter of antiquarian research. But no 
one who has realised how great was the influence 
of antiquarian studies upon the earlier phases of the 
romantic movement in England and in Germany will 
fail to recognise their yet greater importance in less 
favoured lands. 

With the other main branch of the Western 

Slavonic stock things had fared even worse. The 

very language of the Czechs had fallen 

Bohemia. . J ° ° . ' 

into contempt. And here again the 
Jesuits, who from the Thirty Years' War onwards 
had been charged with the education of the country, 
would seem to have been the chief offenders. The 
publication of a new book in Czech was almost 
unknown ; old books were systematically seized and 
burnt. And it is a fact which in itself speaks 
volumes that the very men who, at the close of 
the eighteenth century, set themselves to revive 
the study of the national language, literature, and 



Joseph IT. 



490 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

history, wrote for the most part either in German 
or in Latin. 

The first check to this disastrous tendency arose from 
causes which were designed to strengthen it. Joseph 
II. was the living embodiment of those ab- 
stract ideals which were at once the motive 
power and the most tangible result of eighteenth- 
century philosophy. And from the first he waged 
relentless war against the " particularism," and above 
all against the national languages, of his motley 
dominions. From the time of his election as Emperor 
(1765) all his influence was directed to this object. 
And with his succession to the sovereignty of the 
hereditary states of the house of Hapsburg (1780) 
his power to that end was indefinitely enlarged. As 
early as 1774 German was made the sole language of 
instruction and administration throughout Bohemia; 
and the Czech language and literature bade fair to be 
banished even from memory. But the very violence 
of the attack called out a resistance which was hardly 
to have been expected. And the next ten years 
saw the birth of a movement which changed the 
whole current of men's thoughts, alike in politics 
and literature. 

In the literary revival the leading figures were 
Dobner (1719-1790), Pelzel (1734-1801), Durich (1738- 

Nationai 1802), K. I. Tham (1763-1816), and above 

revival all Dobrovski (1753-1829). As in Poland, 
the first step was to open up the knowledge of the 
nation's past. Dobner led the way with an edition of 
Hajak's Bohemian Chronicle in Latin (1764-86), to- 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 491 

gether with a collection of hitherto unedited documents 
during the same years. Pelzel followed closely with a 
short History of Bohemia (1774) ; then with biograph- 
ies of Charles IV. and Wenzel IV., and other works 
of historical research ; finally (1791-96) with his Nova 
Kronika Ceska, down to the death of Charles IV., 
and a continuation to the middle of the Hussite War, 
which, however, remained unpublished. It is only 
in the last that he ventures upon Czech ; all the 
rest are written in German. Durich published his 
'Bibliotheca Slavica antiquissimae dialecti communis 
universse Slavorum gentis ' — or rather, the first and 
only part of it — in 1793 ; the earliest appearance, 
we may say, of Pan slavism in literature. Lastly, 
Dobrovski, who had joined Pelzel in editing Scriptores 
Rerum Bohemicarum (1782-84), and was again to do 
so in an original work on the principles of Czech 
Grammar (1795-98), took his place at the head of the 
whole movement with his Geschichte der bohmischen 
Sprache und Litteratur, published in 1791-92, rewritten 
and greatly enlarged in 1818. 

The only other works to be mentioned — and in 
their own way they are no less significant — are 
Balbin's Apology for the Czech Language, published 
at Pelzel's instance in 1775, and promptly suppressed 
by the Government ; and Tham's Defence of the Czech 
Language (1783) ; both of which are written in German. 
These, as their titles show, were a direct challenge to 
the repressive policy of the Government; and they 
serve to mark at once the bitterness of official hos- 
tility and the force of the resistance with which it 



492 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

was met. From the date of Tham's treatise onwards, 
there was an uninterrupted stream of writings directed 
to the revival of the national language, history, and 
literature. And, in principle at least, the national 
cause may be said to have been won. What remained 
was the yet harder task of turning the victory to 
account; of converting the antiquarian revival into 
one that should touch the deeper issues of thought 
and imagination. The writers above mentioned had 
performed the task of Percy and Warton. Was there 
any man capable of doing for Bohemia what was done 
in our own country by Coleridge and Scott, and in 
Germany by Herder and Goethe ? To this question, 
so far as our period is concerned, the answer is not 
satisfactory. An attempt was made by Wenzel Tham, 
younger brother of the Czech champion, to create a 
national theatre. But, for the most part, the writers 
of this generation seem to have contented themselves 
with the milder and more vaporous inspirations of 
foreign romance — the Fables of Florian, Young's Night 
Thoughts, above all the Idylls of Gessner, which found 
no less than four translators before the end of the 
century. It was not until the first quarter of the 
next century was nearly out that the Slav leaven 
began to show itself with effect — in the Slavy Dcera 
of Kollar (1821-24) and the poems (Smisene busne) 
of Celakovski (1822). 

In Eussia, destined to play so large a part in the 
literature of the next century, the signs of dawn are 
already perceptible. Here, as elsewhere, no doubt, the 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 493 

hand of France, of the classical tradition, lay heavy 
upon the land. But, considering the back- 

Russia. 

wardness of the nation, this was hardly so 
great an evil as in other countries. The choice was 
between an imported literature and no literature at 
all. In the face of a debt so heavy, it is important to 
distinguish the several heads of the account. And, 
besides the classical tradition which came in with 
Peter the Great (1682-1725), two later streams of 
French influence must be jealously held apart. The 
first of these, the influence of Voltaire and the 
Encyclopedists, fills the long reign of Catherine 
(1762-96). The second, that of the earlier roman- 
ticists (Eousseau, De Belloy, and others), begins to 
make itself felt at the turn of the century, during 
the troubled reign of Paul (1796-1801) and the 
opening years of Alexander. The latter, it need 
hardly be said, is the truly vital influence. It was 
reinforced by the advancing tide of German roman- 
ticism, immediately across the frontier. And in 
Eussia itself it stirred memories which had long 
slumbered; it touched instincts which had seemed 
to be buried for ever beneath the exotic culture of 
the last century, but which, at the contact of a 
kindred spirit from without, and under the shock 
of a war for life and death within, soon sprang to 
a life more vigorous than ever. It is of this, 
and of the earlier movement towards " reason " 
and "enlightenment," that it is alone necessary to 
speak. 

Among the disciples of Voltaire, few were, or pro- 



494 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

fessed to be, more ardent than "Saint Catherine." x 
From her accession she kept up a lively 

Catherine II. _ . _ . _ r . r _ ' ., 

correspondence with the Patriarch; while 
both she and her heir were in constant communication 
with other members, more or less orthodox, of the 
Church: Grimm, Diderot and La Harpe. The most 
tangible result of this intercourse was the showy legis- 
lation, the famous Nakaz (Instruction), of 1767. This 
seemed so incendiary to the authorities of the time 
that it was publicly burnt in France, and eventually 
suppressed, by " Minerva's " order, in Eussia itself. 
The whole thing, like Potemkin's villages, was de- 
signed for effect ; and the authoress was the last 
person in the world to take it seriously. In her 
closing years she took violent alarm at the French 
Eevolution, and the real woman came out from be- 
neath the varnish of mildness which had imposed 
on her gullible preceptors. The history of Novikov 
(1744-1818), one of the few writers who stand out 
from the surrounding darkness, will serve to illus- 
trate both sides of her character and of the period 
itself. 

Novikov, who had begun (1773) with various works 

on the antiquities, " real or fictitious," of Eussian hist- 

Fersemtion 0I 7 — this itself is important for its bearing 

of Novikov. on foe subsequent national and romantic 

movement — soon passed, with some encouragement 

from Catherine, into journalism and the publication 

1 For Voltaire's flattery, see the Correspondence with Catherine 
passim; especially the letters of Jan. 22, 1771, Nov. 2, 1772, Dec. 
11, 1772, 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 495 

of books intended to spread new ideas and useful know- 
ledge among his countrymen. In this connection he 
became editor of a paper with the significant name 
Utrennie Svjet (Morning Light), and of other journals, 
first at Petersburg, then at Moscow, where he still 
continued the publication of his " Library." In all 
his work he is a curious instance of the attempt, not 
uncommon during this period, to combine rationalism 
with mysticism. In his later years he is said to 
have surrendered himself entirely to the latter, and 
become an ardent Eosicrucian. This, however, was far 
in the future ; and his troubles were due to a different 
cause. Having attacked the Jesuits, at that time 
under the protection of the Empress, and having 
drawn on himself further suspicion by various ben- 
evolent undertakings, he was placed under surveil- 
lance. The Archbishop of Moscow was charged to 
report upon his writings, and, though the report was 
favourable at least to the character and motives 
of the writer — " I have never known a more pious 
Christian," — he was first interned in one place or 
another, then imprisoned, apparently under conditions 
of great cruelty, and not released until the accession 
of Paul. It is said that Catherine called for his 
blood. She certainly denounced him as a "revo- 
lutionary," and took every step to prevent the spread 
of the "French contagion." The two things which 
told most heavily against the unhappy man were his 
mystical leanings — he was closely connected both with 
the Freemasons and the Quakers — and his efforts to 
spread the doctrines of the Encyclopedists. Of the 



496 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

former, the Archbishop professed himself " able to 
understand nothing " ; he seems to have been par- 
ticularly puzzled by Novikov's comments on Pascal's 
Pensdes and the Night Thoughts of Young — a curious 
combination. The latter, the "French plague," he 
pronounced to be " pernicious " ; and Catherine — who, 
as ci-devant Minerva, knew all about it — was em- 
phatically of the same opinion. The whole story 
throws a strange light both on the intellectual back- 
wardness of the country and on the enormous ob- 
stacles thrown in the way of any man who strove 
to reform it. And Novikov, who in his own day was 
boldly seconded by Lopuchin, may be fitly regarded 
as precursor of Eyljaev and other " Decembrists " of 
the next generation. 

We turn to the other influences at work during this 
age of preparation — to those which have more direct 
Drama: bearing upon imaginative art. On the 
comedy. lyrical poetry of the time it is unnecessary 
to pause. Its chief representative, Djerjavin (1783- 
1816), though his work contains unexpected gleams of 
descriptive power, obviously reflected from the French, 
German, and British "poets of nature," Ossian in- 
cluded, is for the most part drowned in his own grand- 
iloquence, and discharges his official task of panegyric 
with more than a laureate's pomposity. Like other 
poets of his time, moreover, he writes after the syllabic 
system of French prosody, which is entirely opposed 
to the genius of the Eussian language. More promise 
appears in the Drama and the Novel. The former, in 
particular, shows signs of marked originality. And 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 497 

this applies especially to Comedy. Here it is only 
fair to begin by acknowledging the services of 
Catherine, who, with all her hateful qualities of heart, 
had undeniably a keen and sprightly intellect. From 
the first she set herself to reform the drama of her 
adopted country and to make it an instrument of en- 
lightenment. In collaboration with Princess Dashkov 
and others, she wrote comedy after comedy with 
this object, particularly in the early part of 
her reign. 1 Eussian landowners, Freemasons, Cagli- 
ostro, superstition, fanaticism, Gustav III. of 
Sweden — these were the miscellaneous victims of 
her satire. All these plays were originally pro- 
duced on her private stage at the Hermitage, and 
many of them were afterwards performed in public 
at Petersburg and Moscow. Such pieces, hastily im- 
provised, could hardly make great claims to literary 
art; and, to do her justice, the authoress always 
modestly depreciated them. The period, however, 
produced one comedian of talent which hardly falls 
short of genius — Fon-Vizin, whose name betrays his 
German extraction (1745-1792). His two Plays, The 
Brigadier and The Infant (Njedarosl), 1766 and 1782, 
would have sufficed to make an epoch in the history 
of any theatre. They are doubtless much influenced 
by French comedy: one of the least happy of Moliere's 
devices, the Imperator ex machina, is borrowed, for 

1 With operas, they fill four volumes of her collected works. They 
include adaptations from Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor) and 
Calderon. She would seem to have sent some of her comedies to 
Voltaire. See letters of Oct. 17, 1772, and Feb. 13, 1773. 

2 I 



498 EUROPEAN LITERATURE — THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

instance, to wind up the intrigue of Njedarosl. But 
the vividness with which the barbarism of the Eussian 
squirearchy is painted, the grotesque absurdity of the 
hulking infant, "little Mitrophant," and the sparkle 
of the dialogue, are all the author's own; and it is 
much to be regretted that he wrote so little in this 
line. The path that he opened was followed, with yet 
greater originality, by Gribojadov and Gogol some half 
century later ; the Inspector of the latter being prob- 
ably the highest achievement of the Eussian drama. 
But, on the whole, the stage has proved too narrow 
for the peculiar genius of the nation. It is in narrat- 
ive poetry and the novel that the great writers have 
most fully seized both the comedy and tragedy of life, 
and shown the deepest knowledge of man's heart. It 
was not in comedy but in the novel that the greatest 
triumph even of Gogol was attained. 

Tragedy during this period can boast of no writer 
comparable to Fon-Vizin. Yet here, too, work of 
considerable talent was produced. This 
was by Ozerov (1775-1816), each one of 
whose dramas embodies some form or other of 
the romantic spirit. The first, CEdipus at Athens 
(1804), is avowedly modelled on the play of Ducis. 
The second, Fingal, bears on its face the influence 
of Ossian ; while in its double chorus — of bards and 
priests of Odin — as well as in the violence of its 
action and its defiance of the Unity of Place, it departs 
widely enough from the classical conventions. The 
last, Dmitri Donskoi (1807), though it has been 
harshly treated by some of the critics, is probably the 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 499 

most striking of the three. In his choice of subject — 
the liberation of Eussia from the Tartar yoke — the 
author follows in the steps of De Belloy and Joseph 
Chenier. And, though Voltaire and Kacine have left 
their mark upon his language, it is beyond question 
the romantic innovators whose influence prevails. 
Written under stress of the dread and hatred of 
Napoleon, performed exactly a month before the battle 
of Eylau, what wonder that thte stirring drama roused 
the spectators to a frenzy of enthusiasm, that its fiery 
appeal to the memories of the past carried all before 
it ? The Historic Drama, as we have seen, played a 
large part in the romantic revival; and, if we ex- 
cept Charles IX., no drama of the kind struck home 
so directly to the heart of those who witnessed it 
as this. 

It remains only to speak of the Novel ; and, here 

again, we confine ourselves to the work of one writer. 

Karamzin (1766-1826), who was later to win 

Novel. _ \ . . ; 

fame as a historian, began with two tales, 
Natalja and Bjednaja Liza (1792), one of which, at 
any rate, sets him, at a stroke, among the masters. 
The former of these, the story of a girl who elopes with 
a young outlaw, is somewhat spoilt by the dash of 
jocoseness which the author chose to mingle with his 
sentiment. Yet, even here, the directness of the nar- 
rative and its genuine humour show considerable power. 
In Bjednaja Liza — the story of a girl's betrayal — no 
such abatement need be made. The humour of Natalja 
is doubtless absent ; it would have been singularly out 
of place. But in simplicity, in pathos, in rigorous ex- 



500 EUROPEAN LITERATURE— THE ROMANTIC REVOLT. 

elusion of all that is not absolutely germane to the 
matter, this short story — it could easily be printed in 
thirty pages — has seldom, if ever, been surpassed. The 
masterpiece of Karamzin has little, or nothing, in 
common with the Russian novel, as it has subsequently 
taken shape. It belongs rather to the stock of Rous- 
seau and Saint- Pierre. 1 But, in the larger sense, the 
author is not unworthy to have prepared the way for 
the creations of Gogol, Turgeojev, and Dostojevsky. 

This closes our sketch of the Romantic Revolt. Dur- 
ing the thirtyyears of our period — sooner in oneeountry, 
later in another — we have seen the stirrings 
of a new life spread from end to end of the 
commonwealth of Europe. Everywhere they brought 
a reaction against the classical conventions. Every- 
where, directly or indirectly, immediately or in the 
long-run, they resulted in throwing the nation upon its 
own resources, in restoring to it the heritage of its own 
soil. In the Latin countries, no doubt, this process was 
less thoroughly carried out. For there the soil itself 
was steeped in classical traditions ; and for the French- 
man or the Italian the escape could not be so complete 
as for the Teuton and the Slav. Yet even in France 
and Italy the old forms largely vanished, the old spirit 
was profoundly modified. For the Teuton, in a less 
degree for the Slav, these years were, in the strictest 
sense, a new birth. There had been nothing like it 

1 It may be added that he translated Shakespeare's Julius Ccesar 
and Lessing's Emilia Galotti. He was the only Russian of the time 
to be deeply influenced by the English and the Germans, 



OTHER COUNTRIES. 501 

since the Eenaissance. But, whereas the Renaissance 
was, in the first instance, the invasion of a foreign 
culture, the Romantic Revival was, except in the 
Latin countries, a war of liberation. Hence, in spite 
of a general resemblance, the marvellous variety of 
genius, of imaginative beauty conceived and shaped by 
genius, which it produced. It was a return to the 
soil — to the inexhaustible fertility of nature. 

Consult the following, among other works : Biographie Universelle 
and Nouvelle Biographic Generate (as before) ; Ticknor, History of 
Spanish Literature (3 vols., 6th ed., 1882) ; Bouterwek and Sismondi 
(as before) ; Rhizos-Rhankabes, Histoire litter aire de la Grcce moderne 
(2 vols., 1877) ; J. ten Brink, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letter- 
hunde (1897) ; Hansen, Illustreret Dansh Litteratur Historie (3 vols., 
2nd ed., 1902) ; Vedel, Svensk RomantiJc (1894) ; Pypin und Spasowic, 
Geschichte der Slavischen Litteratur en (German translation, 3 vols., 
1880) ; Pypin, Istorija Russkoi Literatury (4 vols., 2nd. ed., 1902-3) ; 
Bruckner, Geschichte der Russischen Litteratur (1905). 



INDEX. 



Albany, Louise, Countess of, 453, 
462. 

Alembert, Jean-le-rond d', 362-3, 
391. 

Alexis, Wilibald (i.e., Wilhelm 
Haring), 88. 

Alfieri, Vittorio, Conte di, 270, 
437, 448, 452-4; his classical 
genius, 457-8 ; romantic elements 
in it, 457-8 ; his comedies, 459- 
61 ; his autobiography, 461-2. 

Algarotti, Francesco, Conte di, 438. 

Almeida, Tolentino de, 471. 

Anti-Jacobin, the, 119, 221, 237. 

Arabian Nights, the, 73, 193, 481. 

Araujo, Antonio de, 472. 

Arnold, Matthew, 23, 26, 265, 430T" 

Arouet, Francois. See Voltaire. 

Austen, Anne, Lady, 20. 

Austen, Jane, 87, 106-8. 

Bage, Robert, 96, 113-4. 
Baggesen, Jens, 478-9. 
Baillie, Joanna, 91-2. 
Balbin, Aloys Boleslav, 491. 
Balzac, Honore de, 356. 
Baour-Lormian, Louis Pierre Marie 

Francois, 373. 
Barthelemy, Jean Jacques, 389, 

390. 
Beattie, James, 28. 
Beaumarchais, Caron de, 359, 365-7. 
Beccaria, Cesare, Marchese di, 438. 
Beckford, William, 99, 100, 291. 
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 351. 



Belloy, Pierre Laurent Buirette de, 

360, 389, 466, 476, 493, 499. 
Bentham, Jeremy, 143-8, 329. 
Beoivulf, editio princeps of, 158. 
Bertin, Antoine, 379. 
Bertola-di-Georgi, Aurelio Georgio, 

441-2. 
Bilderdijk, Willem, 474-5. 
Blake, William, 36-41, 50. 
Bodmer, Johann Jacob, 160, 172, 

189, 192. 
Boie, Heinrich Christian, 190, 215, 

216. 
Bowles, William Lisle, 52-3. 
Browning, Robert, 45, 48, 93. 
Brun, Johan Nordahl, 479. 
Buifon, Jean Louis Leclerc, Comte 

de, 386, 388-9. 
Burger, Gottfried August, 10, 15, 

30, 55, 190, 215-9. 
Burke, Edmund, 45, 120-37, 147, 

154, 330, 391, 395, 432, 434, 435. 
Burney, Frances, 104-6, 107. 
Burns, Robert, 27-36, 41, 50, 218. 
Butler, Samuel, 35. 
Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord, 

15, 22, 42, 48, 50, 51, 53, 69, 76, 

85, 89, 90, 102, 120, 262, 420, 

428, 445, 475. 

Caffe, Societa del, 437-8. 
Calderon, Pedro Cald. de la Barca, 

102, 255, 287, 296-9, 301, 303, 

305-6, 311, 464, 469. 
Campbell, Thomas, 48-9. 



INDEX. 



503 



Canning, George, 76, 119. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 149, 262, 263, 
312-3, 314, 342. 

Casti, Gianibattista, 444-5. 

Catherine II., 362, 390, 392, 493, 
494, 495, 496. 

Cavendish, Henry, 164. 

Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 439-41. 

Chateaubriand, Francois Rene, 
Vicomte de, 10, 114. 358, 377, 
379, 381, 385, 386, 409, 412, 416, 
417, 418 ; his relation to Rous- 
seau, 419-20 ; his romances, 421- 
4 ; Le Genie, 424-6 ; as critic, 
426-8 ; his place in Romance, 428 ; 
429, 435. 

Chatham, William Pitt, Earl of, 
154. 

Chatterton, Thomas, 10, 13. 

Chenier, Marie Andre, 398-404, 423. 

Chenier, Marie Joseph, 367-9, 371-2, 
397, 450, 476, 499. 

Choderlos de Laclos, Pierre Am- 
broise Francois, 355. 

Churchill, Charles, 17. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 15, 
30, 31, 37, 43, 45; his poetry, 
55-7, 74, 76, 80, 84, 86 ; Osorio, 
91 ; 134 ; as philosopher, 148-50 ; 
as critic, 150-1 ; 243, 251, 318, 
428, 481, 492. 

Collins, William, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17, 
30, 39, 52. 

Colman, George (the younger), 95. 

Comte, Auguste, 134, 347, 393. 

Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine 
Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de, 
393-4, 408. 

Constant, Benjamin, 398, 414. 

Coraes, Diamantes, 473. 

Correa Garcao, Pedro Antonio, 
471. 

Cowper, William, 16-27, 28, 32, 52, 
79. 

Crabbe, George, 41-6, 70. 

Cumberland, Richard, 94, 97. 

Dalton, John, 164. 

Danton, Georges Jacques, 367, 397. 

Darwin, Charles, 164. 

Darwin, Erasmus, 164, 237-8. 

Dashkov, Princess, 497. 

Davy, Humphry, 164. 

Day, Thomas, 111, 487. 



Deken, Agatha, 476-7. 
Delille, Jacques, 376-8, 475, 486. 
Delia Crusca, Accademia, 437-8. 
Dellacruscans, the, 117. 
Desmoulins, Canaille, 396-7. 
Diderot, Denis, 174, 182, 183, 261, 

353, 358, 362, 390, 466, 494. 
Djerjavin, Gabriel, 496. 
Dobner, Gelasius, 490. 
Dobrovski, Joseph, 490-1. 
Dostojevski, Fedor, 500, 
Dryden, John, 17, 34, 472. 
Ducis, Jean Francois, 363-5, 498. 
Dugonics, Andreas, 474. 
Dumas, Alexandre (pere), 88. 

Edda, the, editio princeps of, 160. 
Edgeworth, Maria, 87, 109, 111. 
Edinburgh Review, 153. 
Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 162. 
Eliot, George {i.e., Marian Evans), 

87, 108. 
Ellis, George, 118-9, 153. 
^pinay, Louise Florence Petronille 

d', 362. 
Erskine, Thomas, Lord, 142. 
Escoiquiz, Juan, 469. 
Ewald, Johannes, 480-1. 

Fabre d'Eglantine, Philippe Fran- 
cois Nazaire, 367. 

Feith, Rhijnvis, 475-6. 

Fergusson, Robert, 11. 

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 131, 187, 
192, 194, 336, 340-2, 343, 345, 
347-8, 349, 350. 

Florian, Jean Pierre Claris de, 
381, 492. 

Fontanes, Louis, Marquis de, 378-9, 
409. 

Fon-Vizin, Denis, 497-8. 

Foscolo, Ugo, 439, 450-2. 

Fox, Charles James, 155. 

Franklin, Benjamin, 163. 

FranzeiD, Franz Michael, 484. 

Frederick the Great, 168, 250. 

Frere, John Hookham, 119. 

Gait, John, 87. 

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 108. 

Gessner, Salomon, 372, 442, 472, 

492. 
Gibbon, Edward, 123, 162. 
Gilford, William, 117, 153. 



504 



INDEX. 



Gilbert, Nicolas Joseph Laurent, 
353-4. 

Gilpin, William, 21. 

Gleim, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig, 
172. 

Godwin, William, his novels, 103-4 ; 
Political Justice, 140-3. 

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang v., 9, 15, 
82, 83, 160, 164, 165, 168, 170, 
176, 179, 183, 187, 190, 191, 194, 
195, 200, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218 ; 
Gbtz and Werther, 221-5 ; early 
lyrics, 226-8 ; Italian journey, 
229-32; Iphigenie, 233-6; Roman 
Elegies and Metamorphose der 
PJlanzen, 236-8 ; as man of 
science, 238 - 43 ; Xenien, 244 ; 

• Wilhelm Meister, 244-8; Her- 
mann, 248-50; ballads, 250-1; 
Naturliche Tochter, 251-3 ; Faust, 
253-61 ; 276, 278, 280, 281-2, 287, 
290, 310, 318, 350, 409, 411, 415, 
416, 420, 428, 441, 448, 451-2, 
475, 492. 

Goeze, Melchior, 180. 

Gogol, Nicolai, 498, 500. 

Goldoni, Carlo, 437. 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 8, 23, 24, 96, 97, 
135, 262, 377. 

Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 172, 
176, 188. 

Grattan, Henry, 156. 

Gray, Thomas, 8, 13, 32, 47, 211, 
369, 439, 446, 447, 472. 

Gribojadov, Alexander, 478. 

Grimm, Jakob, 161, 210, 308. 

Grimm, Melchior, 374, 376, 390-1, 
494. 

Grimm, Wilhelm, 161, 210, 308. 

Gustav III., 483, 496. 

GustavIV., 484. 

Gvadanyi, Joseph, 474. 

Haller, Albrecht v., 189, 372. 
Hardenberg, Friedrich v. See 

Novalis. 
Hauff, Wilhelm, his Lichtenstein, 88. 
Haydn, Joseph, 351. 
Hazlitt, William, 33, 42. 
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 

131, 187, 194, 206, 329, 334, 336, 

344-6, 348-50, 407. 
Heine, Heiurich, 312, 319, 325. 
Heinse, Wilhelm, 190. 



Herder, Johann Gottfried, 10, 86, 
160, 181, 187, 190, 194 ; his idea 
of evolution, 201-2, 204-5; his 
philosophy of history, 205-6 ; his 
work in primitive poetry, 209- 
12 ; his relation to Komance, 
212-5; 216, 225, 253, 350, 408, 
409, 492. 

Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 159. 

Holcroft, Thomas, 95-6, 381. 

Holderlin, Friedrich, 279. 

Horvath, Adam, 474. 

Hugo, Victor, 43, 88, 115, 215, 261, 
309, 318, 370, 372, 400, 401, 402, 
403, 404, 420, 422, 423, 428. 

Humboldt, Alexander v., 206. 

Humboldt, Wilhelm v., 280, 295. 

Hume, David, 145, 147, 320. 

Inchbald, Elizabeth, 112-3. 
Iriarte (or Yriarte), Thomas de, 

465. 
Isnard, Maximin, 397. 

Jeffrey, Francis, 58, 70, 153. 
Johnson, Samuel, 16, 17, 45, 105, 

106, 112. 
Joseph II., 490. 
Joubert, Joseph, 429. 
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchior de, 

466-8. 

Kant, Immanuel, 134, 149, 168, 187, 
206 ; his metaphysics, 320 - 7 ;• 
his ethics, 327-30 ; his aesthetic, 
330-5 ; 336, 338-9, 340 ; his pol- 
itical philosophy, 346 ; 411. 

Karamzin, Nicolai Mikhailovitch, 
499-500. 

Keats, John, 34, 39, 55, 84, 186, 
196, 215. 

Kellgren, Johan Erik, 483. 

Kinker, Johannes, 476. 

Kisfaludy, Alexander, 474. 

Klinger, Friedrich Maximilian, 190. 

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 172, 
189, 192, 213, 475, 480, 484. 

Kniaznin, Franz Denis, 486. 

Kollar, Johann, 492. 

Kollataj, Hugo, 487-8. 

Korner, Christian Gottfried, 274. 

Korner,' Theodor, 319. 

Kotzebue, August v., 207, 300, 315-7. 

Krasicki, Ignaz, 487. 



INDEX. 



505 



Lachmanu, Karl, 161. 

La Harpe, Jean Francois, 354, 356- 

8, 359, 360, 494. 
La Huerta, Vicente Garcia de, 466, 

468-71. 
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste de Monet 

de, 164, 204. 
Lamb, Charles, 68, 73, 152-3, 181, 

428. 
La Place, Pierre Antoine de, 361. 
Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent, 164. 
Lebrnn, Ponce Denis Ecouchard, 

354. 
Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 320. 
Lemercier, Nepomucene, 369-72. 
Lemierre, Antoine Marie, 360-1, 

476. 
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 168, 

171 ; early poems and dramas, 

172-3 ; Miss Sara Sampson, 173 ; 

Minna, 175 ; Emilia, 177 ; Na- 
than, 179; critical work. 181-8; 

194, 197, 204, 207, 208, 255, 330, 

350, 360, 441, 500. 
Letourneur, Pierre, 361-3. 
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, his Tales 

of Wonder, 81, 223. 
Lidner, Bengt, 483-4. 
Lillo, George, 174. 
Lyrical Ballads, 50-60, 62-5. 

Mackenzie, Henry, 102, 115. 
Mackintosh, James, 137-8. 
Macpherson, James, 9-15, 373, 

439. 
Maistre, Joseph, Comte de, 430- 

5. 
Malthus, Thomas, 164. 
Manzoni, Alessandro, 88, 261, 262, 

287, 452. 
Marlowe, Christopher, 255, 256, 

258. 
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 132, 458. 
Melendez Valdes, Juan, 464. 
Mendelssohn, Moses, 322. 
Mercier, Louis Sebastien, 359, 362, 

381-4, 391. 
Metastasio, Pietro, 437. 
Meyer, Heinrich, 249, 296, 307. 
Michaelis, Johann David, 162. 
Mickiewicz, Adam, 489. 
Miller, Martin, his Siegwart, 475. 
Milton, John, 20, 47. 52, 136, 235, 

258, 484, 487. 



Mirabeau, Gabriel Honore Kiquetti, 
Comte de, 397. 

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 
Baron de, Letires Persanes, 99 ; 
L y Esprit des Lois, 205, 408, 410. 

Monti, Vincenzo, 446-8, 449. 

Moratin, Leandro, 470. 

Moratin, Nicolas, 464, 466. 

Mozart, Wolfgang Amedee, 351, 
366. 

Muller, Johannes v., 162. 

Myller (or Muller), Christian Hein- 
rich, 160. 

Napoleon, 10, 224, 365, 370, 396, 

397-8, 407, 436, 439, 447, 449, 

471, 499. 
Naruszewicz, Adam Stanislas, 488. 
Necker, Jacques, 362, 405. 
Necker, Suzanne, 386, 405. 
Nibelungenlied, the, editio princess 

of, 160, 161. 
Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich, 188, 

226, 244. 
Novalis (i.e., Friedrich v. Harden - 

berg), 191, 311-2. 
Novikov, Nikolai Ivanovitch, 494- 

6. 

Oehlenschlager, Adam, 478-9, 481- 

2. 
Ossian, 9-15, 210, 218, 373, 439, 

447, 475, 498. 
Ozerov, Vladislav Alexandrovitch, 

498-9. 

Paine, Thomas, 138-40. 
Parini, Giuseppe, 493-4. 
Parny, Evariste Desire Desforges, 

Vicomte de, 379-80. 
Peltier, Jean Gabriel, 426. 
Pelzel, Franz Martin, 491. 
Percy, Thomas, 9-15, 28-9, 86, 211, 

213, 492. 
Picard, Louis Benoit, 316. 
Pietists, the, 170, 329. < 

Pigault-Lebrun, Charles, 356. 
Pindar, Peter (i.e., John Wolcot), 

116-7. 
Pindemonte, Giovanni, 449-50. 
Pindemonte, Ippolito, 446. 
Pitt, William, 119, 121, 142, 157, 

447. 
Poniatovski, Stanislas, 390, 486, 



506 



INDEX. 



Pope, Alexander, 17, 18, 26, 34, 41, 

47, 52, 53. 
Prevost, Antoine Francois, 355, 

361. 
Priestley, Joseph, 123, 163. 

Quarterly Review, 117, 153, 262. 

Radcliffe, Anne, 100-2, 223. 

Raleigh, Professor W., 58. 

Ramsay, Allan, 11. 

Raynal, Guillanme Thomas Fran- 
cois, 387. 

Reimarus, Hermann Samnel, 179. 

Restif de ]a Bretonne, Nicolas 
Edme, 355-6. 

Richardson, Samuel, 105, 174, 356, 
476. 

Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich, 312- 
5. 

Robespierre, Maximilien, 390, 397, 
403. 

Rogers, Samuel, 46-8. 

Roland, Marie Jeanne, 393. 

Rolliad, the, 118. 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 41. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 2, 22, 102, 
113, 114, 124, 161, 170, 190, 206, 
212, 213, 214, 222, 224, 267, 269, 
330, 353, 380, 381, 383, 384, 385, 
386, 410, 414, 416, 419, 421, 422, 
432, 446, 484, 487, 488, 493, 500. 

Ryljaev, Kondraty Fedor, 496. 

Sainte - Beuve, Charles Augustin, 
181, 378. 

Sainte -Palaye, Jean Baptiste de la 
Curne de, 159. 

Saint-Lambert, Jean Francois de, 
374-6, 391. 

Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 384-7, 
380, 421, 500. 

Sand, George (i.e., Aurore Dupin), 
10, 381, 415, 420, 422, 430. 

Saurin, Bernard Joseph, 359. 

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 
Joseph, 192, 194, 343-4, 345, 348, 
350. 

Schiller, Friedrich v., 15, 93, 94, 
168, 179, 190, 207, 217, 234, 240, 
244, 245, 250, 261, 264; early 
dramas, 266-8 ; early lyrics, 268- 
9; Carlos, 269-72; DieKunstler, 
273 ; historical works, 275 ; later 



lyrics, 276-80; ballads, 280-2; 

later dramas, 282-9 ; his Macbeth 

298; his aesthetic, 335-40, 350; 

416, 441, 482. 
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 191, 

194, 266, 291, 293, 294, 295-7, 

298-9, 412, 481. 
Schlegel, Friedrich, 160, 191, 194, 

244, 266, 291, 311, 317, 481. 
Schleiermacher, Friedrich David, 

163, 300. 
Schldzer, August Ludwig, 162. 
Scott, Walter, 11, 69, 79-88, 116, 

153, 262, 309, 492. 
Sedaine, Michel Jean, 358, 362, 

391, 466. 
Senancour, Etienne Pivert de, 429- 

30. 
Seneca, his tragedies. 457. 
Shakespeare, William, 23, 151, 184, 

186, 194, 222, 361-5, 391, 423, 

469, 475, 480, 487, 500. 
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, her 

Frankenstein, 103. 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 34, 140, 

142, 165, 186. 
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, his 

plays, 95, 96-8 ; as orator, 156. 
Sieyes, Emmanuel Joseph, 395-6. 
Smith, Adam, 123. 
Smith, Sydney, 153. 
Sousa, Cattarina de, 471. 
Southey, Robert, 35, 55, 68, 75-9, 

80, 8Q, 153. 
Stael, Anne Louise Germaine, 

Baronne de, 310, 374, 398 ; poli- 
tical writings, 405-8 ; de la Lit- 

terature, 408-10; deVAlleinagne, 

410-4 ; novels, 414-5 ; her place 

in Romance, 415-7 ; 419, 435. 
Staszic, Stanislas, 487-8. 
Stein, Charlotte v., 227. 
Sterne, Laurence, 262, 314. 
Stolberg, Christian, Graf v. (the 

elder), 190, 244. 
Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, Graf v. 

(the younger), 190, 244, 248. 
Sturm und Drang, period of, 190, 

213. 
Swift, Jonathan, 135. 

Tham, Karl Ignaz, 490-1. 
Tham, Wenzel, 492. 
Thomson, George, 27, 35, 



INDEX. 



507 



Thomson, James, 7, 32, 50, 372, 

373, 374, 375, 446, 469. 
Thorild, Thomas, 483. 
Thorkelin, Grimr Johnson, 158. 
Tieck, Ludwig, 191, 291, 297-9, 

301-9, 311-2, 481. 
Tolstoi, Alexis, 88. 
Tolstoi, Leo, 110. 
Trembecki, Stanislas, 486. 
Turgenjev, Ivan, 110, 500. 
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 362, 

373, 393. 

Unwin, Mary, 25-6. 

Vaughan, Henry, 40. 

Vega, Lope de V. Carpio, 464, 469. 

Vergniaud, Pierre Victorien, 397. 

Verri, Alessandro, 438, 442-3. 

Verri, Pietro, 438. 

Vico, Giambattista, 161, 206. 

Volney, Francois Chassebceuf, 
Comte de, 390. 

Voltaire, Francois Arouet de, 2, 99, 
113, 114, 170, 172, 174, 180, 188, 
192, 206, 322, 330, 353, 354, 357, 
359, 362-3, 368, 372, 383, 389, 
391, 393, 394, 416, 427, 438, 446, 
469, 470, 475, 478, 487, 493, 495, 
496, 497. 

Voss, Johann Heinrich, 191, 248. 

Wackenroder, Wilhelm, 307. 



Walpole, Horace, 24, 98. 

Warton, Thomas, 118, 160, 294, 

492. 
Wegierski, Thomas Cajetan, 486. 
Weimar, 194, 220. 
Werner, Friedrich Ludwig Zachar- 

ias, 309-11, 318. 
Wesley, Charles, 18, 19. 
Wesley, John, 19. 
Wessel, Johan Herman, 479-80. 
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 192-4, 

235. 
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 

192, 195-200, 204, 209. 
Wolcot, John, 116-7. 
Wolf, Friedrich August, 159, 161, 

203. 
Wolff, Christian, 320. 
Wolff, Elizabeth, 476-7. 
Wordsworth, William, 11, 23, 34, 

37, 38, 39, 44, 49, 50, 51 ; his 

poetry, 53-5, 57-75, 84, 86 ; The 

Borderers, 93 ; 140, 151, 165, 250, 

274, 375. 

Xenien, the, 243-4, 302. 

Young, Edward, 373, 469, 472, 484, 

492, 495. 
Yriarte (or Iriarte), Thomas de, 

465. 

Zablocki, Franz, 486. 



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